Promoting BOINC to local computer user's groups.

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BOINC Atlantic Team
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Joined: 11 Oct 11
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Message 42878 - Posted: 5 Mar 2012, 22:18:23 UTC
Last modified: 5 Mar 2012, 23:01:15 UTC

Hello group,

Last Thursday I made a presentation about BOINC to the Tidewater Unix Users Group (TWUUG). I had never attended a meeting before, so I figured that the best motivation to get myself out to one was to volunteer to make a presentation. Then I had to go, right?!

Anyway, they are a very friendly group but what surprised me is that nobody had heard of BOINC before. Can you imagine that after all of these years, some folks still don't know what BOINC is? And these guys are hardcore computer geeks besides!

As you probably guessed, this group consists of Unix/Linux software and hardware enthusiasts, admins and hackers so of course they want to know all of the details about how BOINC works. I did my best to explain, and they also had me execute the TOP command to see how BOINC interacts with the system. They seemed impressed that BOINCs NICE setting was 19 (which means it is a low priority process). In Linux the NICE rating goes from +19 to -20 with a "-" rating indicating higher priority scheduling.

This came up when I was taking them through the Preferences settings and explaining the setting labeled:

"When processor usage is less than [ ] percent (0 means no restriction.)"

Apparently on a Linux system that setting does nothing since it's the NICE setting that actually determines what priority the application gets. I did not know that.

In the end, the group seemed to approve of the software which is high praise from knowledgeable folks like that. Hopefully we will gain some new crunchers from the encounter. I plan on attending the regular monthly meetings from now on.

Is there a local computer users group in your area? Maybe they would like to hear a presentation about BOINC? A copy of the mind map I used for my presentation is here:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/59498129/BOINC_presentation_TWUUG.png

I will gladly share the .mm (mind map) file if you have a program that can read it. I use FreeMind which is available from the software repository (GNU/Linux).

The actual .mm file has active hyperlinks to the websites I used in my presentation.

Let's spread the word about BOINC!
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BOINCuser

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Message 42964 - Posted: 9 Mar 2012, 17:14:03 UTC

Really Good job!

Yea, could u imagine how many extra credits we would have if they we're already crunching.

I also got a few people familair with BOINC but not that much.

Keep it up!
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finvenkisto

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Message 43131 - Posted: 22 Mar 2012, 0:34:41 UTC

I would be interested in the original .mm files if it would be convenient for you to post them. Great job by the way!
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BOINC Atlantic Team
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Message 43133 - Posted: 22 Mar 2012, 11:43:29 UTC - in response to Message 43131.  

Thank you. I am happy to share the .mm file and the images used with it. I just need to figure out the best way to do that. Send me an email (mark at boincatlantic dot org), and I can send it as a .zip attachment (68.7kb). I am also working on a website for the Atlantic Team, so I could put it there to download.

It's basically an HTML file that Freemind reads so I could post it here, but that would be a long post, and the images that it links to would be lost.



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Stefan Maerz

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Message 43214 - Posted: 30 Mar 2012, 16:53:54 UTC

According to the top 500 website, Jaguar's peak value is 2.33 petaflops. The max value is 1.80. [1]


As defined by top 500, peak vs max:
Rmax - Maximal LINPACK performance achieved [2]
Rpeak - Theoretical peak performance [2]

IIRC LINPAK is the benchmark program they use.

And even Rmax isn't a fair comparison as the organic structure of BOINC means that measuring Rmax or Rpeak would be impossible or have no meaning (when will every single BOINC computer be on at 100% utilization simultaneously?).

Perhaps in the future, take another step and list the Rmax values of the top 10 computers - then you could show how BOINC is number 2 (thereby discussing the weakness of the comparison and a little bit about BOINC structure).

I think it would be neat to integrate a plot of BOINC's 24 hour average compared with time. I don't know where to find that though.

I also think this is really neat that you did this. I need to introduce it to some people I know.

[1] http://www.top500.org/list/2011/11/100
[2] http://www.top500.org/project/top500_description
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BOINC Atlantic Team
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Message 43393 - Posted: 11 Apr 2012, 2:53:14 UTC

I've been curious about Pinterest so I created an account there and created a board to promote BOINC. Since Pinterest creates a link from an image back to the originating website, I thought that might be a good way to spread awareness of volunteer computing to a new audience.

http://pinterest.com/chmod777mark/boinc/

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Message boards : Promotion : Promoting BOINC to local computer user's groups.

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