Crowd Sourced Computing for Solar Cells

[somethingsketchy]

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/09/crowd-sourced-solar-cells/
http://cleanenergy.harvard.edu/

Just barely read this article. It has very interesting concept, though I'm not sure if there is any sort of BOINC/F@H Team Competition "style" that could be formed. Upon clicking the link, I see it's part of the World Community Grid.

Thoughts? I'm currently working through a SoB task and a couple PPS (Sieve)'s, so I won't be able to join for several days

 

[Ken g6]

I tried to do it. It said my internet connection wasn't fast enough. D:

 

[Smartazz]

Yeah, it's one of World Community Grid's intermittent projects.

 

[Rattledagger]

I tried to do it. It said my internet connection wasn't fast enough. D:

CEP2-uploads is around 20 MB, so to guard against users with very slow connections being overloaded, there's a download-speed-limit. The BOINC-client measures all downloads and keeps track of a weighted average, so if you've example just downloaded a bunch of SETI-wu's during a period there connection is saturated so you've only managing 1 KB/s or something, the BOINC-speed will obviously be very low...

The check for download-speed is only done if you're using the CEP2-default of having only a single CEP2-wu at once on a computer, meaning CEP2 can only use a single core in a computer. If increases to having possibility of 2 (or more) CEP2 at once, no checks for download-speed is done.

Note, CEP2 is fairly disk-intensive, and if you tries to run "too many" CEP2 at once, chances are you're getting a "no heartbeat for 30 seconds", and this means all BOINC-wu's will re-start from last checkpoint. For CEP2 it can be many hours (*) between checkpoints, meaning being hit with a CEP2-restart is decidedly negative.

So if you've got a computer with more than 4 cores, I wouldn't recommend immediately setting CEP2 to "unlimited", but instead trying-out how many your disk-system can handle at once.


(*): Don't be fooled by the 1st. checkpoint in a wu that happens after 1 minute or something, the 2nd. is also fast after 10 minutes or something. The time to the 3rd. checkpoint is normally the longest, over 5 hours on a i7-920 isn't uncommon.