Dear Mr Allen,
Anonymous
23 Apr 2006 22:11:21 UTC
Topic 13319
(moderation:
Quote:
at first I have to say that you should be proud to run such a spectacular project, involving thousands of volunteers providing Teraflops of Home PC calc power.
Bruce and all the people who made E@H work on this end are proud. The volunteers who made E@H a success should be proud as well.
Quote:
Oh yes, the projects' success is the work of the volunteers, and their only benefit from participating is (besides satisfaction to support science research) to compete in that little contest counting their cobblestones.
We are aware that the volunteers are the heart of E@H.
We try our best to give the volunteers a positive experience as a small repayment for their contributions. Even though we don't always succeed it is not because the we do not appreciate all that the volunteers have done for us.
I don't know what to say about the cobblestone issue. I will leave that to Bruce.
Quote:
As for many others, it was a great thing for me to view the ranking every morning how our team was prospering and how my personal position changed overnight. Of course, there are guys running BOINC on huge computer centers I can hardly compete with. But that's life!Then, within the last weeks, a horrific enemy showed up. Yes, it's your 638 Dual Core Opteron weapon I'm talking about. And I'm really astonished about that: Is it for your personal vanity that you're competing with home computer users?
Hey, you're supposed to crunch on every machine available to you, for sure. Because it's your job to do so. I wouldn't have said a word if under your name the iBook and the PowerMac showed up. Also those two boxes would not make me complain. But the entire cluster under your name? Come on, you must be kidding us ;)
It should be a competition among volunteer crunchers. Or are the team and user stats something i would in german call "Schwanzvergleich", proving you have the biggest one? ;)))
And finally, a serious word to say: Throughout the last week I found the project servers down for several reasons. Meanwhile, there's at least one hour downtime to expect per day. How comes you're running 600+ computers under your name and the project servers suffer from hardware issues almost daily? How about spending a few of your boxes to increase system stability. It would not cost your first place in the team ranking, for sure.
For those who are interested Bruce is running E@H on the brand new NEMO beowulf cluster. NEMO is not stable yet and E@H is being used to burn the cluster in. In the future NEMO will primarily be used to look for gravitational waves from inspirals.
The E@H downtime has nothing to do with Bruce running E@H on the nemo cluster.
The recent downtime resulted from:
-
* a bad power breaker in the room E@H was located
* some flaky hardware in the database server (possible bad mobo?)
Last Friday I moved all the E@H servers from the old room on the 3rd floor of the UWM physics department to a to a new data center on the 2nd floor. The new data center was primarily built for the NEMO cluster but there is plenty of room for E@H as well. There is a giant UPS for the entire room and there is tons of cooling so I am very happy with our new home.
Today the database server finally had a complete failure and so we are now running off the backup server.
We are not completely out of the woods yet but I have new servers here and more hardware on the way that should make E@H fast and reliable on this end. I will have the computers I need but it will take some time on my part to get everything working.
Quote:
Ok. I wonder if I will ever receive serious answers on that one. Happy crunching to all of you out there.
There is your answer. I know we don't always communicate the best but you can rest assured that we are working hard behind the scenes.
Once again thank you to everyone who has contributed.
P.S. I appologize if I got too defensive.