Which project to crunch?

[cineon_lut]

Hi all. I have a noob question for the forum. I'm seeing the percentage of people crunching seti@home dwindling in favor of other projects. While that's fine and all, I'm curious as to the reason for such an exodus. Do other projects "pay" more credit than seti@home?

I originally got on Seti Classic back in '04, left when they switched to Boinc, and started trying it out again this year. Now I'm hooked. I'm curious about the other projects. I really believe in what seti@home is trying to do, and don't want to crunch just for crunching's sake. Thoughts?

Crunch on!
Vic

[Crazybob]

Welcome Vic! We all like the SETI@home project, but it doesn't give credits as good as some of the other projects. Also one of the administrators there has a very hard time with the way some of the other projects give out credit. For some of us it's all about the credit. For others it's about making a milestone in as many projects as they can. For others, it's all about what the project is doing for science. We don't discriminate here, all are welcome to join us and discuss the projects or how to make our machines more productive, to challenge other teams in races or to just joke around. You won't find a nicer bunch of people. I think there is a list of projects on our home page. Or if you are looking to get the biggest bang for your buck so to speak, post your machine's specs and we can suggest a project that pays well for your hardware. Again, welcome aboard!

[DrPop]

Hi Vic,
Yes, as Crazy Bob says, there are lots of projects that "pay" better credit per hour than SETI@Home, but we would need to know what kind of hardware you are crunching on to give you the best list for your computers. Please just let us know the CPU and amount of RAM, and also the GPU (graphics card) models that you have, and we can give you some great info! :)

[John P. Myers]

The main reason our SETI@Home crunchers are dwindling the past few days is because we recently had a competition there that has now ended, so many people are going back to what they were doing before that, or working on their goals for other projects, or joining in other competitions. It's nothing to be alarmed about, just that during a competition, a project will gain more of our attention than normal.

[Slicker]

The main reason our SETI@Home crunchers are dwindling the past few days is because we recently had a competition there that has now ended, so many people are going back to what they were doing before that, or working on their goals for other projects, or joining in other competitions. It's nothing to be alarmed about, just that during a competition, a project will gain more of our attention than normal.
That and after 40 years, the closest they've come is a "wow" signal from years ago that they've never ever gotten again. Show me the aliens!

[DrPop]

That and after 40 years, the closest they've come is a "wow" signal from years ago that they've never ever gotten again. Show me the aliens!

LOL! :)) haha...didn't they crash near Roswell back in the '40s? Maybe they've been steering clear of us since! ;)
On a more serious note, I think it would be AWESOME if we did find a cool signal of some other life form's civilization or space craft or something ... would be pretty neat actually.

[myshortpencil]

My recommendation is to go to BOINC Stats for SETI.USA (http://boincstats.com/en/stats/-1/team/detail/15755/projectList) and look at the top 5 daily output. Then try crunching each one of those and see which project gives you the best bang for the buck. Currently, the top 5 are DistrRTgen and Poem (by a large margin) followed by Collatz Conjecture, PrimeGrid and SETI@Home. High daily credit requires a GPU, but not all GPUs will crunch all projects. Top credits on POEM may require an app_info file, but I'm not using the current version of BOINC Manager, so I'm not sure how that works. The other projects run fine with project-provided stock files, to my knowledge, which admittedly is sparse.

Out of the top 5, DiRT and POEM are probably the most useful. World Community Grid also has some useful projects.

[cineon_lut]

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/hosts_user.php?sort=expavg_credit&rev=0&show_all=0&userid=7927253

There's the hosts. I have the best results from the nVidias, and I just brought a GTX 560 online. I have great luck with nVidias, even the non-double precision variety. I have mixed luck with ATI. For instance one machine will give me 100 credits for about 40 minutes worth of GPU work, but an identical build (literally cloned) takes 4 hours for the same credit because of extra CPU time. Look at machines #1 (6988267 (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=6988267)) and #6 (7085596 (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=7085596)) sorted by RAC. They're identical, and I'm stumped as to the poor performance of #6.

Another weird occurrence is that I get better results from ATI HD 5700s than I do from 5800s. The 5800s (see machine 7071180) don't do a thing for me, and I'm taking those offline.

I've got all guns firing on SETI now, #4 in the team by RAC and #62 overall by RAC, but I'll keep my eyes open for any competitions where you need some extra horsepower.

Crunch on!
Vic

[artemis8]

I generally crunch challenges and then my favorites, based on what they do for the the world. I like Rosetta and World Community Grid, sciency type ones do more for me than mathematical ones. Just figure out what you care about and crunch that. There is definitely no right or wrong way as to which projects to crunch.

[cineon_lut]

I generally crunch challenges and then my favorites, based on what they do for the the world. I like Rosetta and World Community Grid, sciency type ones do more for me than mathematical ones. Just figure out what you care about and crunch that. There is definitely no right or wrong way as to which projects to crunch.

Thanks. I'm thinking the same thing. My first love in the project is seti@home, but last week I got a taste of Einstein, Collatz, Poem, DiRT. Just trying to see which GPU is best with which project. I had the Radeon 5800s as total losers for SETI, but they're blazing on Collatz. I'll keep an eye out for challenges.