SETI.USA Bash Brothers Group

[STMahlberg]

Personally, I like having the open forums. One less thing to pay attention to, and avoids any permission issues.

So you don't think that it really matters if SG or Le Frog members can see what we are planning?

[Maxwell]

So you don't think that it really matters if SG or Le Frog members can see what we are planning?

Except in some highly specialized applications (e.g., Pentathlon), no. Credit strategy: Aqua for CPU. DNETC for 58xx GPU. etc. They know that. Primegrid challenges: crunch it *really* hard. Duh.

So no, I don't think that's an issue. Plus, one of the points of contention on the old boards was "who gets access" to that protected area. Here, now, everyone's equal.

[zombie67]

WARNING: graphic anatomical crudeness ahead:

Hey STM - How did it know your "character" was too short? Did it have one of those new full body x-ray scanners on you?! hehehe...couldn't resist!

I agree with you Beer and Slicker - we need to focus on high production projects to retake the #1 overall slot. It's the only way it will ever happen again.
If anyone has bothered to look lately, our team is not that big anymore, either. S.G. Has more members, and LAF has over 1000 more than we do. Crunch3r is right - upgrading is a must, but so is recruiting.

I also agree that PG kills our RAC, but we should do our best to take the crown. We only need a strong showing in the last 2 to do it. Then we don't ever have to do a low paying PG again if we don't want to.

Meh. #1 overall just means you have more ATI cards running DNETC. It's become a meaningless stat.

[STMahlberg]

Except in some highly specialized applications (e.g., Pentathlon), no. Credit strategy: Aqua for CPU. DNETC for 58xx GPU. etc. They know that. Primegrid challenges: crunch it *really* hard. Duh.

So no, I don't think that's an issue. Plus, one of the points of contention on the old boards was "who gets access" to that protected area. Here, now, everyone's equal.

Your points are valid and well taken; I shall post my thoughts then.

[STMahlberg]

I have been watching alrigth.....Looks like we are loosing...But I know in my heart that we will return...Maybe we will not be #1 sometime soon....But we will damn sure show them that we are going down figthing!!

So looking at the stats it appears that SG is going to hand us our proverbial asses in about 20 days according to my math. Checking members we have ~1,500, that is the number of members producing >= 1 credit per day; compare that to SG who has ~2,000 based on the same criteria.

I haven’t looked at comparing other factors yet just member numbers which are out producing us by 4.7 million credits per day.

Meh. #1 overall just means you have more ATI cards running DNETC. It's become a meaningless stat.

I understand what you are saying Zombie67 but I don’t agree with that; I understand that there are those that say they earned their credits the hard way, i.e. running cores alone; I applaud those whom have had to do that but it is 2010 and I think that is “horse and buggy whip” mentality.

Should we simply shutdown our ATI and Nvidia cards and drop even further back in rank and merely claim the stats and ranks that LAF and S.G. hold are meaningless?

… I agree with you Beer and Slicker - we need to focus on high production projects to retake the #1 overall slot. It's the only way it will ever happen again. If anyone has bothered to look lately, our team is not that big anymore, either. S.G. Has more members, and LAF has over 1000 more than we do. Crunch3r is right - upgrading is a must, but so is recruiting. …

I do agree with crunching high production projects, upgrading and recruiting. The first one is easy to focus on and recruiting is simply going to take time and consistency.

Upgrading is a different story; obviously it takes money and at times a lot of it… These are hard economic times for all of us and the future is uncertain, I know that every dime I’ve been making has been going to paying off debt and saving for a down on a small house or condo; so upgrading wasn’t in any of my rigs immediate future.

Theoretically we have 12,766 members according to BOINC Stats; I know that’s probably not completely accurate but bear with me… the old board lists 2,306, as of this post, there are only 49 members on this board.

There are two things that I have not heard mentioned, retention and reacquisition. What I mean by that is we need to make an effort to retain the members that we already have who are active. And we need to try and reacquire members who were on the board at one time and encourage them to come back.

I think retention of members is important; they need to want to come back to the board. I’m sure that many of you probably think that I am a lunatic with all of my wild “Girls with Guns” posts and my maniacal rants, raves and blogging. I know these things have absolutely nothing to do with any of the projects or Team goals… I hope that at least I have been somewhat interesting and entertaining; personally, I don’t want to read about projects ALL of the time, I need a distraction once in a while.

Also I think we need to make an effort towards reacquisition of old members; we should try and contact them. I know this would be a painstaking task but I believe that it would be worth the effort, so much in fact that I am willing to work on this myself.

Just my 2 cents.

EDIT:

An additional thought just crossed my mind... Assimilation. There are many smaller Teams out there, how about we open dialogue with them and see if they would be willing to be incorporated into SETI.USA. I'm talking about the whole team not just some of their members, that would be poaching and I think that's unethical.

[zombie67]

I understand what you are saying Zombie67 but I don’t agree with that; I understand that there are those that say they earned their credits the hard way, i.e. running cores alone; I applaud those whom have had to do that but it is 2010 and I think that is “horse and buggy whip” mentality.

Should we simply shutdown our ATI and Nvidia cards and drop even further back in rank and merely claim the stats and ranks that LAF and S.G. hold are meaningless?

Eh? I never said anything about shutting down anything. We should continue to use the resources we have. For example, #1 in project blah means we are #1 in blah. If we aren't #1 there yet, we should try to be.

Being #1 in DNETC doesn't mean we are #1 in BOINC. But being #1 in BOINC means you must be #1 in DNETC. And nothing else matters, really. Therefore total credits have become meaningless.

[STMahlberg]

Should we simply shutdown our ATI and Nvidia cards and drop even further back in rank and merely claim the stats and ranks that LAF and S.G. hold are meaningless?

Eh? I never said anything about shutting down anything. We should continue to use the resources we have. For example, #1 in project blah means we are #1 in blah. If we aren't #1 there yet, we should try to be.

Being #1 in DNETC doesn't mean we are #1 in BOINC. But being #1 in BOINC means you must be #1 in DNETC. And nothing else matters, really. Therefore total credits have become meaningless.

I didn't say you did, I was simply posing the question which I thought was the logical next step in the debate... If total credits have become meaningless then why crunch at all?

What I probably should have said is that I don't believe that the credits are meaningless. Yes DNETC seems to be fairly libral with their credits but even if they reduced the credits by a factor of 10 or 100, we would still be exactly where we are along with the rest of the teams.

Let me put this another way, if we were #1 in Einstein and that pushed us into the #1 position overall, doesn't that just mean we have more cores running than anyone else? Does that suddenly make the credits meaningless?

Video card technology has jumped leaps and bounds past CPU's and also how tasks are processed by each; core technology will catch up eventually. And I believe we will catch up too.

[zombie67]

I didn't say you did, I was simply posing the question which I thought was the logical next step in the debate... If total credits have become meaningless then why crunch at all?

What I probably should have said is that I don't believe that the credits are meaningless. Yes DNETC seems to be fairly libral with their credits but even if they reduced the credits by a factor of 10 or 100, we would still be exactly where we are along with the rest of the teams.

Nope. We are getting our ass kicked specifically because of a few GPU projects, and because other teams have more GPUs on them than we do. The CPU projects have become meaningless when comparing cross-project stats.

Kevint saw this coming over a year ago and said so explicitly. He gave us fair warning and we didn't do enough like the other big teams did.

[STMahlberg]

Nope. We are getting our ass kicked specifically because of a few GPU projects, and because other teams have more GPUs on them than we do. The CPU projects have become meaningless when comparing cross-project stats.

Kevint saw this coming over a year ago and said so explicitly. He gave us fair warning and we didn't do enough like the other big teams did.

Well, I get the fact that the GPU projects are hurting us because we are unable to take advantage of them. So we simply need to get more GPU's online and that takes money.

Cross-project comparison... I understand what you are saying, it's comparing apples to oranges. I'm not sure if there is a fix for that issue.

The credit system is the only thing we have right now as a gauge and no matter what that is ever changed to, it's still going to be skewed IMHO.

No matter what, it still comes down to shear horsepower, the one with the most horses wins and right now THEY have the most. We need to change that.

[Maxwell]

Getting this thread back to its original purpose...

One of our hard fought #1's is ABC. Still pays pretty well on 64-bit machines (the only thing I'm running now). And were losing ground...

http://stats.free-dc.org/stats.php?page=proj&proj=abc