Distibuted Computing...

[DarkPhire]

Well, I also went to United Devices Search for Cancer, But I joined AMDzone.com 's team.

I think the stats are much more interesting as well as something is always happening.

I think they key for these distributed computing companies is Good screen savers, Good stats, and fast programs with competition.

Ive tried distributed.net, entropia2000, United Devices(cancer research and human genome) , Folding@home, and Seti@home. I liked Seti@home because of the competition. FOlding at home has a Really neat map thing on the homepage that shows where their work units are coming from, they also have an awesome screen saver. I would run the seti screen saver cuz i love that but its so damn slow. Makes my computer run like my old pentium II 350. Entropia has a good screen saver, and good stats, except you cant view any other teams! (how lame!!) .

So far United Devices is the most interesting Ive come across, because the cancer reasearch Just started, So im in on the beginning, thats kind of a neat thing as well Distributed.net is so boring, and thers so many people you cant make a difference. NO stats either from what i could find.

Anyways, thats my input =)

I think the best thing would be is for a company to come along and use all of these ideas in ONE. Since Most people only have one CPU to give, and once you get sucked into distributed computing, its HARD to decide =) I dont know if any of you have the same dilemna HEHE =)

Sorry I dont have the websites for most of these,
you could probably find most of them using a search engine. Entropia can be found at http/www.entropia.com
Distributed.net http/www.distributed.net
Seti@home http/setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/
Folding@home http/www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/Cosm/
United Devices http/www.ud.com/home.htm

those are the ones i know, if anyone knows anything better reply!!

--DarkPhire

 

[Guest]

I think that distributed computing is really a good way for research centers to get lots of work done fast and for a very low cost.
I read that an ASCII White from IBM (which performs similar to all the SETI users) costs 110M USD, SETI only spent 500k USD to set up their network!
I think that cancer research is the best research subject at this moment, most of my relatives have died in this and hopefully I can help to find a cure for this (without studying medicine) before it's my time...
The Inquirer team is quite cool, I'm top three already and I have two more PCs to add this weekend! My friends in Betel Nuts are supposed to join in as well so we will be a kick-ass team there!
Unfortunately the MD website is seriously slow and seldom updated, it's too apparent they are using some hyped P4's as servers there...

 

[Guest]

It may seem cooler to look at screen savers while your project of choice is running but this actually causes a serious hit on your computer's performance. Distributed.net is arguably the least interesting while running but that's because ALL your CPU clock cycles are spent on useful calculations. People who use the command line version of SETI instead of the one with the screen saver have reported as much as 25% faster average work unit completion rates. If you're really into distributed computing from a competitive aspect, you gotta ditch those screen savers, especially ones that use directx. BTW, distributed.net has plenty of stats. You can check the daily or total progress of any individual or team at stats.distributed.net. Their main page also shows plenty of neat graphs of overall progress.

 

[DarkPhire]

Yeah I do agree. I think though that you could find a medium between Stats and screensaver. I mean All it would take for me, is a simple little bar graph, with some fancy colored numbers underneath showing my progress on the unit as well as my statistics and such.

Right now Im running United Devices Cancer research. Its currently my favorite. I think it has the best balance.

--DarkPhire