• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

Someone tell me what BOINC is!

S

Sideswipe001

Golden Member
Okay, I've been running "regular old SETI" for months now, but it's mostly just installing them and forgetting. Today I ventured into DC forum and I see this stuff about SETI BOINC. Someone tell me what it is, and if I should switch, and why!
 
BOINC SAH is the Future of Seti@home classic

SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.

because of Problems and a lot of Cheaters, BOINC war born, it calculates the same Date as Setihome Classic, but in a different Way and with a Verification................

so i think it is time to change to the

right sight of the Future, more links to this

Overview with BOINc

BOINC Homepage

and so on...

sir Ulli
 
BIONG!!! is a complete and total waste of time if you want to actually do any work.
The SETI app under BOING!!! is using the same data and doing the same work as classic. When of course you can get any work to do that is. Stats are not updated for days, people complaining about not being credited for work done. Database servers and disk arrays failing, website outages, the list goes on and on. Classic is a set it and forget it type app. If you want to do work and get credit for work done, stick with SETI1.
 
Originally posted by: SNC
BIONG!!! is a complete and total waste of time if you want to actually do any work.
The SETI app under BOING!!! is using the same data and doing the same work as classic. When of course you can get any work to do that is. Stats are not updated for days, people complaining about not being credited for work done. Database servers and disk arrays failing, website outages, the list goes on and on. Classic is a set it and forget it type app. If you want to do work and get credit for work done, stick with SETI1.
Click to expand...

agree totally with snc.
stick with sah classic 🙂
 
If you wants to be #15 cruncing the same wu, by all means stick with "classic".

In seti@home for BOINC, the wu is sent out to 3 users. Only if error/missed deadline is the wu sent out to more users. This means, even the current application is slower, you can crunch seti for BOINC 12 hours/day and the other 12 hours run other projects, but still do more seti-science than if you ran "classic" 24 hours a day...


Seti for BOINC have had some hardware-problems, and since the best machines is still tied-up running "classic" also performance-problems. Due to resent changes & optimizations of backend-software, atleast with current load it's no problems supplying everyone with work.
Seti for BOINC is having many short outages, mainly due to server-changes, but since BOINC has built-in-caching this isn't really a problem. BOINC also is multi-project, so if you've attached to other project like LHC and CPDN you'll keep crunching even if one project is down. 🙂


As for stats, BOINC have much more detailed stats-update every 24 hours, and if you wants you can check every wu you've crunched if error or not. "Classic" have more often stats-updates, but much less info & for a long time now always doublet-teams in top-200 so...

Due to all the cheating in "classic", seti for BOINC only gives credit after a result have been validated, this means slower crediting. Of course cheaters & users overclocked too much doesn't like this, since they're not getting credit for their garbage, but for users crunching "correctly" the earlier credit-bugs seems to be fixed now.
Of course it's possible to still lose some due to server-problems, but this isn't any different than in "classic" sometimes giving error-messages on all results...

The BOINC-client is currently being updated fairly often, so currently isn't recommended to use on seldomly accessed computers. But if you've got a permanent connection and easy access this shouldn't be a problem. If you've installed BOINC with it's built-in service-install, it's easy to make a couple batch-files and upgrade many computers then needed. 🙂

Lastly, a little quote from 6 Aug 2004 7:44:25 UTC
Both Classic and SETI/BOINC are processing the same number of work-units a day. Classic is just making a bunch of machines process the same data over and over again. We reached parity with Classic a week or two ago.
Click to expand...
Meaning, with less than 50k users the SETI@home-BOINC-version was back in July outcrunching 450k-"classic"-users, or in other words doing more scientific work...
 
Though my fleet is 98% seti oriented, BOINC will also let you "timeshare" your computer(s) among a number of projects ( i think currently 5).

In the last few days SETI has caught up with granting credit to all older results returned, and is now keeping up with current crunching.
 
The currently "active" BOINC-projects are:
SETI@home, LHC & CPDN, but LHC is currently limited to 5000 users so no new users can join.

Predictor@home is still waiting for Dell delivering new servers, so is currently down.

There's also other projects, but these are either closed alpha or like pirates@home with currently only test-applications that isn't doing any science at all.
 
Classic and BOING!!! do the same work. There is no difference!! In fact when there was a planned outage with BOING!!! the people running the show there said exactly that.

Quote from the the BOING!!! News page :
August 14, 2004
We encourage everyone to run SETI@home Classic during our server outages. SETI@home Classic makes the same scientific contribution as SETI@home/BOINC.

Unless I am misinformed there is no differance in the WUs or the science being done on them.


And we dont get this type of message from Classic: all work that was uploaded during the period of August 13th to 18th was lost and so cannot be credited. As well, all work that was generated and downloaded during that period was lost to the DB and so cannot be credited. This work is being regenerated and redistributed.
 
Posted: 29 Sep 2004 22:07:47 UTC
I put the data tapes into the splitter machines, so let me address this.

Basically, there is no set order in which we split the data tapes. The order is certainly not chronological, nor based on interest. Here's how it works.

1. When the splitter runs out of tapes to split, I get an e-mail saying "splitter done".

2. I reach into one of several boxes containing a few hundred tapes in random order which were shipped from Arecibo. Some of well over a year old.

3. I run some preliminary checks to make sure the data doesn't have too much RFI in it, then throw them into the tape stacker.

Then I get back to what I was working on.

- Matt


BOINC/SETI@home
Click to expand...
Posted: 30 Sep 2004 16:12:40 UTC
Allow me to try to shed more light on how splitting works, to perhaps answer some more questions:

The same tapes are being using to make SETI@home classic workunit as well as SETI@home/BOINC workunits. When I put a tape in the drive, both old and new style workunits are made on the same data.

As well, the same science (or almost exactly the same) is being done in both the old and new clients, so when signals get thrown into the master database, they look the same. A spike is a spike is a spike.

Some may immediately pounce on this as pointlessly redundant (i.e. you *?!*ers at Berkeley are wasting my precious CPU cycles), but actually there is a good scientific reason for this. As we all know BOINC is still working some kinks out of the system, and we need to make sure the science reported by the new clients is sane, and the best way to check that is by comparing new signals against old signals. Okay maybe this is obvious.

Of course, this isn't exactly working perfectly all the time. In order for tapes to proceed down the splitter pipeline, both old and new splitters need to wrap up splitting on it. So when BOINC chokes for some reason, or the old system is acting up, this gums up the works for everybody. In the case of BOINC, we just run out of work, but in the classic system we end up sending out the same workunits over and over. Redundancy is good, but even I admit that too much is bad, and that's why BOINC is made to run out of work (and allow users to work on other scientific endeavors while we get our act together).

So sometimes it seems like we're not producing new work for the classic system, but in fact we are - just very slowly. This is a problem that doesn't get much attention because we are short staffed and anyway it'll be moot when everybody moves to BOINC eventually.

Okay.. back to work..

- Matt
BOINC/SETI@home
Click to expand...


As for "all work that was uploaded during the period of August 13th to 18th", a closer look in the news reveals BOINC was shut off except for 1 of these days...

As for "classic" giving error-messages, what about these:
"As a result of a server bug (now fixed) credits for the last 24 hours were lost."
"We learned that the SETI@home server has been repeatedly issuing the same 115 work units for the last few days."
"We discovered a recent problem that is causing users to erroneously get messages that they are sending duplicate results."
"We have recently diagnosed a long-standing problem: certain work units never get results returned. There are at least two cases: 1) if a work unit produces a result file larger than 60 KB, the client silently discards the result file and fetches a new work unit; 2) if a work unit has corrupt data, the client immediately discards it. In both cases the user doesn't receive credit for processing the work unit.
Because our server never gets results for these work units, they remain on disk indefinitely, and are sent over and over again to clients. Users aren't getting credit for an increasing fraction of the work units they complete."
"Last night the server started generating spurious "duplicate result" messages. The cause appears to be related to a server revision made yesterday afternoon. We've reverted to an earlier server version and are investigating the problem."

Also, many other unexpected and scheduled outages taking much longer than planned, so wouldn't really call "classic" much better at this point.
Not to forget, for around 5 months in 2002 it was impossible to connect to Berkeley both downloading wu & uploading results... Well uploading results was actually possible, but since never got a "ok received" was constantly re-trying to upload.

So Berkeley having small and large server-problems & connection-problems and ocassionally losing or not accepting results, isn't new in BOINC, and still happens ocassionally in "classic".
 
So basically what you are saying is that with the exception of the name and where credits are viewed, there is no difference between Classic and BOING!!!. Why again should people move over to BOING!!!?
 
Well, my interpretation of the quoted text of Matt Lebofsky is, if BOINC is lagging behind, "classic" will re-issue the same wu again and again, while if "classic" is lagging behind, BOINC will either go idle or run another project you're attached to...

Or in other words, "classic" is only doing meaningful science if BOINC is keeping up, while BOINC is doing meaningful science regardless of "classic" keeping up or not...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top