Another new BOINC project. :)

[Fardringle]

Despite the name that is bound to inspire snickers and giggles in the less mature among us (that's most of us, right? ), this project appears to be a mathematical study of the crossing of parallel lines on a graph. The project site doesn't have an actual project description yet so I'm not sure exactly what they are trying to accomplish, but the best "English" definition I can find for the mathematical concept is here:
http://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/rectilinear.html

That description is actually amusing to me since I live in Salt Lake City and from that I know exactly what they are describing. (If you look at a map of Salt Lake, you'll see that all major streets are on an exact North/South and East/West grid.)

The project site is http://dist.ist.tugraz.at/cape5//.

I'll get it added to my project list as soon as I get around to it, or when I get to my home PC. Whichever comes first.

 

[petrusbroder]

Thanks for the info, Fardringle!
This may be a maths-project that I can relate to ...

Starting up ...

 

[petrusbroder]

OK, the team has it's first credits - LOL -

Here are the numbers ...

And I am # 1, at the top, and higest producer in the team ...
... and the team jumped from the 53rd to the 49th rank -

Let us crunch!

Om a more serious notes - I'll report any problems, crashes, hang-ups here and we will see how things are:

1. Just now a total of 260 crunchers ...
2. ... and 59 teams
3. the workunits take anything from 0.17 seconds to over > 50 hours - depending on computer. Short WUs are much more common - long WUs are not common at all (see below).
4. 82 WUs downloaded take 352 kBytes HD-space ...
5. ... the crunching application 332 kBytes, additional files about 25 kBytes
6. Uploads about 4 - 10 kBytes, downloads about the same.
7. The admin of this projects responds to posts in the forum quite often, very friendly.


Here is the forum:

1) Our web is not finished yet. I leave the explanation of the project's purpose to Oswin who is deeply involved in the scientific part. We will create an extra page for that next week.

2) 550 000 WU's will reach for about 40 days, right. But this project will never die, we will just replace the application and the workunits. I can guarantee that there will never be enough computing power to fit our needs.

We have extremely short WU's as well as extremely long ones and this is absolutely unpredictable. Also the algorithm has no chance to estimate how much work is left. This is the reason why we don't update the percent-done-value.
At the moment my P4 3.0 Ghz computes a WU since 53 hours. But such long WU's do not occur often.

Petrus' comment:
The main problem seems to be that there seems no way an algorythm can predict how long a WU takes to crunch. Therefore a comp may download a lot of WUs, after some time start to crunch a long WU and the dead-line for completion may pass without the WUs getting crunched.
The admins have prolonged the deadline, now it is 8 - 10 days. There are still a lot of the old WUs with a two-day-deadline around ... and there you can hit a snag (see above) quite quickly.

I would say that this project is a still public beta-project.

 

[Fardringle]

Nice! I wasn't actually expecting anyone to attach and report results that quickly. I'll have to get attached and join you in the chase when I get home in a few hours.

 

[Assimilator1]

So what does this project do?

 

[petrusbroder]

Originally posted by: Fardringle
Nice! I wasn't actually expecting anyone to attach and report results that quickly. I'll have to get attached and join you in the chase when I get home in a few hours.

LOL Fardringle . I just attached my testing computer - a lowly 800 MHz PIII, doing seti at the side and testing this project ... You have just crunched about 10 times as much as I did OTOH yout floating-point-capacity is more than 4 times bigger than mine ... nice!

And the team has positively jumped from 47th place to 25th!

 

[petrusbroder]

Originally posted by: Assimilator1
So what does this project do?

Here is a link ... that may help.

The projects calculates the minimum number of possible rectilinear crossing in complete graphs where all points are in the same Euclidian plane.

Complete graph: all points are connected to each other by staight lines. One restriction: The points of the graph may not lie on a straight line ...
Euclidian plane: in this case: on a flat surface
Rectilinear crossing: the crossing lines are at 90 degrees angles.
Maximum numbers is easy to calculate - the hard part is to calculate the minimum number.

Practicle use: logistics: how do you connect the points in e.g. the travelling salesman problem. There are many other uses for the solutions ...

With triangles and squares there are no rectilinear crossings. In forms with 5 points there are many, but the smallest number is one rectilinear crossing. The problem has been solved for all graphs of 5 - 17 and 19 - 21 points. The graph with 18 points is the one being crunched - and then it will continue: with 22 points 23 points etc.

This is a DC-project because the number of possible rectilinear crossings increases exponentially: with 11 points the number of possible configurations
is 2 334 512 907, now imagine the number for n=50 ...

I hope my explantion is correct (if not please correct me by posting or by PM) and at least somewhat understandible ... the link may help to search on.

 

[Fardringle]

Originally posted by: petrusbroder

Originally posted by: Fardringle
Nice! I wasn't actually expecting anyone to attach and report results that quickly. I'll have to get attached and join you in the chase when I get home in a few hours.

LOL Fardringle . I just attached my testing computer - a lowly 800 MHz PIII, doing seti at the side and testing this project ... You have just crunched about 10 times as much as I did OTOH yout floating-point-capacity is more than 4 times bigger than mine ... nice!

And the team has positively jumped from 47th place to 25th!

I'm actually rather surprised at how many points I've returned already. I've been trying to get at least 24 hours of work to get decent average results numbers for my projects lists, but so far it looks like this project gives a lot more points per hour than most other BOINC projects.

As for the floating point benchmark on my computer being so high, that's thanks to the new 5.49 client version along with Crunch3r's 550SSE2 optimizations.

The forum is all in Dutch so I can't read it, but you can get the new client here if you want it: http://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_message/25882224#25882224

 

[Assimilator1]

But what's Rectilinear crossing though? lol

 

[petrusbroder]

Originally posted by: Assimilator1
But what's Rectilinear crossing though? lol

start of joke
LOL and ROTFLMAO:
A doctor's di..y mind: recti (as in many rectums ... the orifice for getting rid of fecal matter) and linea (straight line): and thus combined: :stinks:

)
-----------|------------ = rectilinear crossing of a street or a river or what not. Watch for traffic!
)

end of joke

 

[petrusbroder]

On topic again:

Team Anandtech has now three members (Fardringle, Silverthorne and yours truly), has jumped from 47th place to 17th (in credits), from 52nd to 14th (in RAC) and is moving ahead! :thumbsup:

My longest WU took 50,639.94 seconds (=14.07 hours) and resulted in 74.71 credits; the shortest was 0,17 seconds and resulted in 0.00 credits. A 7 second WU gives 0.01 credits ... had quite a few of those. The longest WU has run for more than 50 hours (on a pentium @ 2.8 GHz); the average WU seems to run for an hour or so.
According to the forums, the devs have decided to run a all WUs through a pentium 2.8GHz-comp and have removed all WUs which crunch shorter than 3 seconds on that comp. (All WUs which ran longer were aborted and then sent to the scheduler for distribution).

Loading a new set of WUs ... lets see what happens.

 

[Assimilator1]

heh

Oh well, no idea what this DC is about

 

[Silverthorne]

I really don't either but I now have 3 comps on it and we're now in 9th plache. LOL

 

[petrusbroder]

The TeAm is now in 11th place (total credits) and 9th place (RAC). Still steadily climbing.
Top producer in TeAm: Silverthorne :thumbsup: Congrats!

 

[Silverthorne]

We also have a new team mate, Perry Maskell, AKA The Borg. Welcome aboard.

 

[Silverthorne]

The TeAm is now in 8th place (total credits) and 7th place (RAC). I actually put a couple more computers on this project.

Anyone else wanna help out?

 

[petrusbroder]

Today also idlorj joined with his first production!
Welcome to the effort! :thumbsup:

 

[strates]

Hey petrus... do you mind if I use your research to try and get this project added to DC-Vault?

 

[petrusbroder]

Originally posted by: strates
Hey petrus... do you mind if I use your research to try and get this project added to DC-Vault?

Not at all - just go ahead! Thanks!

 

[Silverthorne]

The TeAm is now in 6th place (total credits) and 6th place (RAC). We also have another new member, Strates.

 

[Silverthorne]

Can anyone tell me if it's possible to transfer work units from my other computers? Both of my Xeons have downloaded a lot of units and my main computer can not seem to connect right now to get more.

 

[petrusbroder]

Sorry, Silverthorne - unless you copy the whole BOINC-directory, I do not know ... and that is not the option since youwant to transfer some WUs and not all of them ...

 

[petrusbroder]

The TeAm has now 6 members (Silverthorne, Perry Maskell, Fardringle, Strates, idlorj and petrusbroder), is now in rank 5 in credits and in RAC.
Nice climb from rank 47 to rank 5 in less than 12 days. :thumbsup:

The teams ahead of us have a RAC of more than 1 200 - hard to catch up just now. OTOH: noone is yappig at our heals either ...

 

[TallBill]

You'll probably see my name pop up as joining the team, but I wont be around for long. Just kinda messing around.

 

[The Borg]

Hi there,

The Borg = Perry Maskell. Just come back from leave and uploaded my results. Pity I could not have downloaded more before I left, but sometimes there machines try to think too much for themselves!!! ;-). Anyway, as soon as a I can I will be crunching some more. Think I can get a RAC of about 1000. So lets go TeAm!!!

BTW, check the RAC now. Only 20 gap!!!