FiND@Home: Small work, biggish score for CPU

[Col323]

I have Justin Bongard to thank for adding this to my list of projects. FiND@home http://findah.ucd.ie/ (aka FightNeglectedDiseases@Home and I believe formerly FightMalaria@Home) is a CPU only biomedical project through Boinc. It runs on the AutoDock Vina platform, the same as WCG's Aids and Ebola projects. Each Work Unit is light on memory usage - typically about 50 MB each, and in the week I've been running this, I don't recall seeing anything over 100 MB. Run times vary from a couple of minutes to about 8 hours. The bulk seem to be under 3 hours, and typically even under an hour. They do not checkpoint, so if you're reboot frequently, it may not be the best option. Although as common as it is to see units run in under 20 minutes, that may not be too big of a problem either.

Credit seems to be fairly generous for CPU work. If I were to run everything on WCG, I think I'd score about 10k-12k per day. I'm getting 18k per day in FiND while still running some WCG and MalariaControl. The project is currently processing a batch of about 60 Million WUs. We're about 7.3 Million into it, and I'm not sure if that's "the end" or just until a hiatus. As you can imagine, we are quickly moving through the work to do. Our team is ranked 71st with no threats and plenty of opportunities. That's with 4-5 of us producing each day, and none of us a really big dog.

Feel free to dip your toes in the water or do a cannonball off the high dive. Let me know if you have questions. It's been pretty set and forget on both Windows and Linux based systems so far.

[USAFA82]

Good info. Thanks for finding this. Always good to have more projects to work on.

[Col323]

I should point out that this is a Boinc project. In fact, I'll edit the original post to do so.

A new member joined the team today. Welcome to the team, Mr.JeffK! You're 2nd on the team in output for today!

[USAFA82]

Welcome Mr.JeffK! Hope you find your way to the forums

[Col323]

Our little team is doing quite well! We made the 1,000,000 milestone as a team today. With 5 people producing, we have been 9th in the daily team rankings the past two days. Mr.JeffK has certainly been a contributor to that.

Plenty of room for more contributors.

/edit: Up next on our radar is our old friends Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science

[pandelta]

Another very interesting project I have never heard of! Does it show up on any stats tracking sites yet? I couldn't find this project on Free-dc.

[Col323]

Yes sir! Here are some links:

Free-DC: http://stats.free-dc.org/stats.php?page=proj&proj=fmah (Note, it's listed under the old name of "FightMalaria@Home")
BoincStats: http://boincstats.com/en/stats/136/project/detail
The project has these and other sites listed here: http://findah.ucd.ie/stats.php

I think stats run once a day. It took me a day or two to show up on the team on the 3rd party stats sites even though I joined as soon as I created my account. The project stats page always showed me on the team, and all my credit applied to the team. And eventually the 3rd party sites caught up, so all is well.

[Col323]

I just squeaked past Zeppelin to be #2 on the team. Only 400 points separate us at the last update.

[Col323]

I'm learning that work is not always available for this project which is a slight adjustment from the steady as she goes WCG. It's pretty consistent, but I think the one project lead manually loads batches and probably doesn't have the time to keep an eye on the amount of work in the queue. As I said earlier, we are chewing through 60 million units, but he hasn't loaded all 60 M. A couple days ago we had a day plus outage until he could load a chunk of 2 million units. Overall, it's an enjoyable project. And I generally run more than one Boinc project at once, so an outage in one project simply means more cycles for other research.

Speaking of other research, I would love to see a Beta for a new WCG project. It's been very quiet on that front.

[Col323]

With 3-6 steady contributors, we have climbed to 51st with only the BlackOps (aka SteVe) team threatening to overtake us. Next up ahead is the US Air Force, which probably won't please our fearless leader.

We still have some big names on our radar ahead. We even had HardOcp on our list for a while until one user started pumping out over 100k/day. Still, we're making good headway!