Hello from Dallas!

[BlackFox1]

Hey there everyone!

My name is Josh and I'm pretty excited to be a cruncher. I think SETI is an awesome project (considering all going on in the space news/community) and as I get the hang of things I will be joining other projects. Right now I only have my laptop crunching and then I'll be adding my machines with MUCH better specs and equipment once I'm comfortable with everything. My typical completion rate (per work unit is it called?) is roughly an hour, although a few have taken 3-4 hours. I have completed 15 so far (woohoo)! A couple of questions for you seasoned crunchers:

How can I speed up crunching? I suspect it's hardware based, cpu/gpu
Where are member rankings for the curious?
Any other add ons to the program or other projects members highly recommend or consider a "must"?

I look forward to being a helpful and contributing member here at good ol SETI.USA team and community!

[Duke of Buckingham]

Welcome Josh.

We have a lot of great crunchers that can have many good ideas for you to improve crunching and I am not one of them.

[Bryan]

Hi Josh ... glad to see you here and thanks for joining the team. BOINC is a lot of fun and it is irrelevant whether someone is a big cruncher or small cruncher. You can set personal goals that are within your capability and then shoot for them. There are challenges that you can enter and participate in -or- not. You can chase credits or "badges" or none of the above

Almost all of us started with Seti when we 1st started crunching. Some still mainly run that project but most of the truly active crunchers run other projects as well.

With regards to team ranking you can view them on Free-DC stats: HERE. There are 2 primary stats sites FreeDC (run by BOK a SUSA member) and BoincStats run out of Germany.

With regards to crunching faster, the absolute highest paying project, Bitcoin Utopia, uses ASIC miners and pays extremely high credits. Relatively speaking it also one of the higher paying CPU projects. There are projects that use GPUs and they will pay much hihger credits than CPUs because they do much more work for a given time. There are a couple of exceptions to that like Asteroids and Einstein that pay better than CPU but not all that much better.

One project that you want to run on ALL of your computers is WuProp. That is a project that gathers information about the WU and projects that you crunch. It will keep track of the total hours that you have spent crunching a project and then award "stars" when you have completed 20 projects of at least 100 hours on each. This project is NCI, non cpu intensive, meaning that although it is running on your machine it requires very very little CPU time. You can add WuProp to your project list by attaching to: WuPROP

One word of caution ... crunching on laptops is very hard on them due to the heat. There is a finite life to the fan in your laptop and crunching causes the fan to run at 100% RPM for extended periods.

If you have further questions please feel free to ask. We do actually have some folks on here that know what they are doing on almost any project, OS, GPU, CPU, or MM (MegaMilestone) chasing.

EDIT: BTW, one of the easiest ways to get paid higher credits is to run something besides Seti ... the payout there really sucks

[Mumps]

Well, don't forget to mention that running the Optimized Apps for SETI helps get more work done (leading to better credits as a side benefit.) The "Lunatics Universal Installer" works fairly effortlessly for most Windows based systems.

http://www.arkayn.us/forum/

[Bryan]

Well, don't forget to mention that running the Optimized Apps for SETI helps get more work done (leading to better credits as a side benefit.) The "Lunatics Universal Installer" works fairly effortlessly for most Windows based systems.

http://www.arkayn.us/forum/

You're correct! I forgot cause I don't do Seti

[BlackFox1]

Shiva,

Thank you for the clarification. Also, are there certain member rankings? I see platinum, silver and diamond members. Thanks!

[Mike029]

Shiva,

Thank you for the clarification. Also, are there certain member rankings? I see platinum, silver and diamond members. Thanks!

Those are based on how many posts you have made on the forums. Welcome to the team!!

[Shandia]

Turning the cpu usage down will help a little if you are running other stuff or using the computer. What helps more is turning the memory usage down and swap file lower than normal. Boinc when running gpu apps tend to use it all. That is one reason to run a mixed system. Most of the time I'll let my nvidia crunch while leaving my amd free to run the computer. Computers rely on gpus far more than most people realize. If I'm using both cards, the internet on the computer is totally unresponsive. Using only one I usually can run full bore and the computer is still useable. Keeping he check mark on suspend gpu tasks when computer is in use is a good idea for when you are away.

As for hardware failure, there are several reasons for it. The main killer is heat and dust. If you don't have tools that you can use to disassemble the housing on a gpu or other stuff from time to time, it would be good to pick them up. Within the last few weeks I lost my best gpu due to that very thing. It was the first time I pulled it apart and the dust was totally blocking the air passage inside. Cleaning it out after the fact is kinda pointless but it strengthens the notion 0f doing a proper cleanout on a regular basis. Another killer is a power supply that doesn't give enough power to what it needs. Spending the extra on a good hi wattage psu is more than worth the cost. Of course there is another killer.....oversight. We all do it. If it hasn't happened to any of us yet, it eventually will. Most of us who are really active tend to push our systems as hard as they will go. By the time they give an indication that something may be wrong, it's too late. I had just gotten in a few parts from a team mate. One of the boards was cooked but still useable. Upon further inspection, there were pins pushing through the insulation of the metal cpu cooler back plate and touching the metal. Not sure how long it took to burn up the 4 pin port. As it is, I had to trim those pins down and give the back plate a little insulation to make sure the pins wouldn't be doing that again. The second board in that batch I got had the same thing with the pins. It showed no signs of being burnt.....but some of the onboard things refused to work like a chip or two had fried. In this case, the oversight of the original owner was to believe assembling it without giving any thought to the eventual outcome.....the pins on the back going through and touching a metal place, is what caused damage. According to the owner it also took out his power supply. Some of this can be taken care of being a little more mindful instead of just assuming that things are good right out of the box. Of course, the last killer......stupidity.....can hit at any time and without warning of when and where. lol Sometimes, this is the easiest one to fix but can be very time consuming. Having to re-install an OS while in the middle of a competition is not out of the norm.

[shiva]

those are badges that are given out by different projects. not all projects give badges, but most do anymore. by the way welcome to the team. one site you can find those at is http://signature.statseb.fr/

[DrBackJack]

I just loaded up seti..man been years. Where is the opti app for this new version 7 at ?