Balancing credits...

... someitmes it is basically impossible.
Especially if you have a GPU set to crunch GPUgrid tasks.




Basically nearly every single GPUgrid result returned is worth insanely more credits than the amount that 3 cores of my CPU and minimal credits from my Nexus 7 contribute.   Take is as you like, but you must definitely get used to seeing credit distribution pie charts like:




But in the

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The Good and the Bad for August

I will admit, I have stopped following my stats on boinc very closely, and I am incredibly sure I have fallen a great deal recently.  Especially as I am not sure how many/ if any days in August my main machine has run.  Honestly 2 of my machines were taken off line from crunching, to be replaced by an android tablet when ever it happens to be plugged in ( which is less than I would like).  The

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BOINC on Android!

I will admit after the Raspberry Pi frustrations I was skeptical about feasibly running any projects on any non x86 processor.  Though through all the endless searching for how to get things working properly on the Raspberry Pi I did come across a few groups working hard and getting decent results getting certain BOINC Projects to run on Android Devices.  I did not give it much thought at the

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Oh Yeah, it is Summer

While I don't even closely watch my Statistics any more, if anyone happens to keep a close eye on my statistics, they will likely see that for the last week and a half they have been rather dire.  By that I mean I am not sure if I have completed a single task in the last week and a half.   The honest truth is I shut everything down to go on a short holiday for July 4th, and never started

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May Update

I am thinking of implementing a somewhat regular set of updates just to make sure I have some regular posts to make on this blog.  I am trying to echo the Atlantic Team blogs lead on this by hopefully making them short and sweet but sharing interesting tid bits about what has happened with my mini farm in the past month.

I am not sure if this happened in May, but I think it happened in May.  In

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I am still alive and Crunching!

It has been over a month since I last posted, and let me just say life has happened.  While crunching has more or less continued besides for a week of down time last week.   My graduate studies in mathematics have come to a halt, and I am now gainfully employed working as a developer on the database side of things.   What does this mean in the long run?  I really do not know, maybe once I get my

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Learning to Program

I have lately taken up a concerted effort to remind myself how to program.  While I am not foreign to the task of programming, once I completed my minor in computer science, I more or less hung up my keyboard ( figuratively) in an effort to focus on mathematics.  I rather regret that, as I really enjoyed programming when I cared about what I was actually programming.

For those of you looking to

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Not all Projects are Equal

I by no means am telling anyone what they should or should not crunch, but the more and more I have been looking into various projects the more I am wondering why some projects have such massive appeal.  So I am a mathematician by training, so you would imagine I would be all over prime grid and a number of other mathematical based projects.  In fact the state of things as they currently stand I

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Why I am never the first to buy a new technology

There seems to be several different types of people in this world, those that always want the newest of everything, and those that like to see what kinks each product has and wait for them to be either worked out or written off as design flaws.  Maybe its because I was one of the early adopters to a particular smart phone, way back several years ago, lets just say anyone that ever had one, mostly

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Running On Autopilot

I am happy to announce that I have gotten my systems up to the point that they are running almost entirely on autopilot.  Part of it came with a little training of myself as well, mostly to not mess too often with the computers.  Due to power concerns I am running my least efficient machine only on weekends, and my highest powered machine, which is incredibly quiet runs most of the time.

Every

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Testing Loyalty

I dedicate all of my GPU crunching time to the project GPU Grid, because I honestly believe in the work that they are doing.  But I hate to say this my loyalty was really tested this past week, possibly made even worse because I was stressed out for another reason and the last thing I needed was to be worrying about how my machine is working on things.

Lets just say a large amount of GPU Grid

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Battered Volunteer Syndrome

I am borrowing the turn of phrase from a poster in the GPU grid forum, because it seems aptly appropriate about what I want to talk about today.  I am amazed at how many people on project forums like to complain about everything that is going wrong at these various projects. Now for one I am known to be a rather laid back person ( passionate yes, but laid back more or less), as such I do not tend

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Computer at Play, While you are Away?

I have my newest computer crunching 24/7 lately, only rarely being restarted for updates, or shut down occasionally for a few hours.  That means it runs when I am at work, sleeping or doing most anything else.  I was more concerned about doing this right after it was assembled feeling it wasn't quite battle tested yet.

Now that its run for many many hours staying incredibly cool, and running

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Farms are Expensive!

Today I received my monthly email from my Electric and Gas company letting me know what my bill was for the past month.  Well I didn't completely do the math when the January notice came, ( as I am on a 21st to 21st schedule), but because I was home for the holiday break, my one machine was offline until the 6th of January, missing about 2 weeks of the billing cycle, and I didn't assemble my

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Should you Beta?

I have really been going back and forth on the question of "should I allow beta tests on my machines?"  When I first set up machines specifically for boinc crunching, my initial thought was these I really wouldn't mind allowing Beta tests to run on them. Though the more I read beta test support forums there are quite a few things that give me pause.  So lets start with a Pro and Con list.

Pros:

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Noise Concerns

For those of you that have a decent sized place to live, and your computers are no where close to your bed, this post will not apply to you.  But I live in a small studio apartment.  So basically everything I own is on one large room, and the only other rooms are a closet and a bathroom in my place.  What that means is all the computers I have on my "farm" are located in the same room I sleep in,

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Ugh--- UBUNTU!!!

I jut came off of a very frustrating nearly 24 hours. As it turns out a software update buggered my Wireless drivers, as such caused some rather odd behavior in which it could find and locate networks, but not connect even with the proper credentials.

 But to be fair I slept and did other things through 16 hours of those 24 hours.  But in the trouble shooting those other 8 hours where split with

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Dust My Arch Nemesis!

I do not know what it is about this apartment, but dust is pervasive, and almost sadistic in this place.   Those of you that know my other interests, know I am rather into Tea and Teaware, and I thought it was bad just to consistently clean my teaware display, which seems to always be getting coated in dust.

Well that build up on the teaware should just be a hint at what is getting sucked into

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What do you do to protect your systems?

Last night into today, large portions of the Midwestern United States into the North Eastern portion had bad ice storms.  While lately I have been taking to turning of all but my most silent system during the night, last night I left my computers off for quite some time to protect them from the storm.

While I have not directly attributed any technologies faults to power surges, I am now quite

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Building a Computer Part 2: The Build!

I am not sure what to believe any more, the more you watch videos on building a computer the more and more the emphasize what goes wrong. ( New Egg has a nice 3 part series, part 2 features the actual building. ) These issues, seem like they can be so accidental, and not actually something you consciously do.  Static electricity being the biggest one.  Keeping this in mind probably pointed to my

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Building a Computer Part 1 Finding Parts

In the past week, I sourced the parts for a new Crunching machine, had the parts arrive, assembled them and set up the entire computer.  This is going to be a post detailing my thought processes behind finding the parts.

Step 1: Find your favorite computer parts supplier.

I went with new egg because they have worked wonderfully for me in the past, and I figured "if it ain't broke don't fix it!"

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Boinc on Raspberry Pi Page Updated

The page about Boinc on the Raspberry Pi has been updated. 

The good news Asteroids@ home announced support for the Raspberry Pi, and it appears to attach, and recognize its ability to run as easily as setting it up on any typical PC.


The bad news, it appears I was far to early to the game in getting my Raspberry Pi.  I got my pi before they doubled the memory on the Model B boards.  Which

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Pending Upgrades

Well this week has been disappointing into receiving shipments, but I won't completely go into that.  The one that matters on this blog is not that major, but I caved an decided to upgrade the GPU in my Tower, also known as the Frankenstein computer, or the Workhorse computer.  This worries me slightly as while I hear from my friend that the GPU works fine with the PSU in the system,  and all

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World Community Grid Badge System

Based on a post on the World Community Grid statistics system, I have decided to write this post hopefully starting a discussion on the pros and cons of each system.  World Community Grid uses total run time dedicated to each project instead of relying on the point system that basically every other badge awarding project uses ( though there seems to be no firm set standard for what gets a point/

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