MacRumors BOINC teams

Hey Mac crunchers,

In addition to the Milkyway@Home team started by Angelo95210, there are a bunch of other projects on which I or others have founded MacRumors teams.

If you participate in any of these projects using BOINC, consider joining up (unless you're on another team and don't wish to switch)

PrimeGrid - search for really big prime numbers, important to encryption algorithms and other applications in computing.
eOn - calculate the dynamics of long-term changes that occur in atomic systems
Collatz Conjecture - test the 3x+1 conjecture ad infinitum.
Einstein@Home - search for pulsars (neutron stars) in deep space...
Pirates@Home - Einstein@Home test project, almost no work, but funny.
World Community Grid - lots of health-related projects, researching global issues, etc. Many projects to contribute to. Uses BOINC but has its own client as well.

I'm known as "NullCoding" in the BOINC world. If you're a BOINC user or distributed computing enthusiast, consider joining one or several MacRumors teams! With the exception of Einstein@Home and MW@H, I am the sole member of these teams at the moment...I crunch a lot but if you want to help out, please do! It's not a contest (but you knew that already), however, teams are ranked and it's cool to see who can contribute the most to the respectable field of science.

Fun facts:

eOn has small WUs that often complete in under 10 minutes. As of now, our team (which is just me) is ranked fairly high...

PrimeGrid, Collatz, and Einstein all have nVidia CUDA apps, so if you have a CUDA-ready GPU, you can amass massive credit quickly and help the team a lot! (Einstein needs a GPU with 450MB+ of memory)

If you have a newer MacBook Pro, you can crunch PrimeGrid CUDA WUs. If you need help setting that up, just ask and I'll walk you through it.

MW@H has multi-processor support for some apps as of yesterday. The more cores you have, the more you can contribute! See this thread for more on our MW@H team.

MW@H needs a GPU (ATi or nVidia) supporting double-precision floating point, meaning compute 1.3+. We currently have one member taking huge advantage of this...follow the white rabbit...

Pirates@Home rarely has work available, and its WUs take under 10 seconds most of the time. If you're really bored, you can fill out captchas for "pieces of eight" that have no significance but will rank you on the leaderboard for...captcha-filling-out.

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If you participate in another BOINC project not listed here, and there is a MacRumors team, please post the info here! And if there isn't a MacRumors team, consider starting one. I think there are many more crunchers around here than it appears.

Thanks for your interest! keep on crunching...

MacRumors eOn team is now ranked 36th overall...and it's just me.

Anyone else here do BOINC? There's gotta be some...

Hey thanks...so you're pretty close to being directly involved in eOn yourself! Not quite an "advanced relational database" but close.

Ranked like ~35th now...eOn's all I crunch now besides MilkyWay...holding off on other projects until I've finished my custom machine (give it a few months).

Cool guys, thanks for joining!

Hmm, depending on what kind of iMac you have, it could be well suited to something like MilkyWay@Home or PrimeGrid (for which anything Core 2 Duo and better is just fine, depending which application(s) you run). Depending on which GPU it has, you might also be able to do some GPU tasks for PrimeGrid or Collatz, but that sort of thing you can't really do whilst using the computer. I left my MBP on all night when I did CUDA tasks for PrimeGrid, but it wasn't very efficient or practical.

eOn is always a sure bet...small WUs, short CPU time, easy to move up the ranks...like we're doing now.

There ought to be - right now, I'm getting 197#####s which take ~6 minutes and 190#####s that take a little under a minute on my i5; the other computer I've got is crunching as well, but it's at my house, so I can't monitor it...just kinda crunches away whenever it's on, meaning whenever my brother's not using it for whatever games it is still capable of running. Under my account, it's listed as the 3.0GHz Pentium 4 machine.

For some reason the other MacBook I've got on eOn is not crunching...I don't think BOINC starts by default, or else it would be well over the current credit it shows. Ignore the Windows 2000 machine that shows up on my account. But yes, there is work for eOn right now. You may need to update the project manually if you have issues getting new WUs.

But yeah, no more computation errors. And no matter if you're running 32- or 64-bit OSX, the new 1.10 client is great. Sure it's a couple of students in charge of the project, but they do a really really good job managing and supporting it.

As for our rank - yes we're on the first page thanks everyone for participating; glad I've gotten others into the grid world. I take it a bit seriously, even though I've only been involved since late September or something like that.

There are also teams for AQUA@Home and RCN, but I barely crunch those...the former has only multi-threaded WUs that take upwards of 12 to 14 hours each, and the latter has some server problems...and WUs that take over 30 hours each and don't report properly.

As for WCG, which someone mentioned - yep I do that too, but my credit has slipped lately, mainly because the tasks take a bit too long for my liking and I like contributing to MilkyWay and eOn with a bit of Collatz and PrimeGrid thrown in. Still no GPU here. The PrimeGrid tasks I do take 15 to 30 minutes (PPS LLR and SGS LLR).

Keep it up all!

Doing great on eOn! Thanks for participating all.

I'm mainly on PrimeGrid nowadays, doing CUDA apps while all 4 CPUs are crunching AQUA. Join me if you'd like, but BOINC is BOINC. Participate in whatever you'd like.

oopsies - accidentally left the eOn team for a few days! I created another team, NullGrid, which is BOINC-wide and exists on all projects, as I'm currently trying to get people I know into BOINC. Let's just say a lot of my friends are serious computer people...

That said, I'm only on NullGrid where MacRumors has no members besides me (so Collatz, AQUA, Pirates, etc). I only have 3 Macs on my account anyway, and plus, the highest-credit cruncher I have is actually an old Dell running XP...

Keep it up all, eOn is always a sure bet with this team.

Well neat!

I've not been doing too much on Einstein lately, unfortunately. The tasks take upwards of two hours in the GPU, which is time better relegated to twelve PrimeGrid tasks, or eight on MilkyWay.

Update: I'm now ranked 1st (for average credit, 3rd or so for total) on the MilkyWay team, still in first on eOn (although my output has dropped a lot lately). This is only because I'm at home with my full (6 computer) grid running with mostly 100% uptime.

Been helping out MilkyWay, Collatz, PrimeGrid, and DNETC with my GTX 460. It's running on my old Windows machine, though. The MBP is on a bunch of projects. I switch off at random.

Thanks for joining!

The Einstein team has actually been around for awhile. I don't know how long, but I didn't start it.

Ha. eOn's about the only thing you can crunch on a netbook. I mean, you could do small PrimeGrid WUs but they might take upwards of an hour. The netbook my brother wanted, for instance, couldn't even run PowerPoint, so I imagine they aren't well suited to BOINC crunching.

Well cool - keep it up

Ok so they've gotten better.

We had someone over at PrimeGrid trying to do a huge WU on an Atom N270, which would take two to four months if on 24/7. That's my new netbook benchmark, lol.

I don't count the MBA as a "netbook" in this situation btw.

eOn is having some serious problems now, I notice. Only really works on 64-bit OSs. About 7 minutes on my i5 MBP opposed to 2h+ on a modded P4 machine (stock CPU clocks).

One of my OS X machines (MacBook 1,2) runs 10.6.5 but I don't think I have 64-bit extensions fully enabled (I don't think I can do that with the old EFI...) but we'll see if this project gets fixed. The developers are a bit...disengaged. Then again, they are college kids. I don't have time to run a BOINC project. I barely have time to maintain my computer farm!

No, I think the C2D T7200 (I think that's what it's called) is 64-bit capable, since the machine is running Snow Leopard. It only recognizes 2GB of RAM but it's running, and fast too. Nothing will kill that thing.

Could be, though, that it's running through emulation. I haven't actually looked at Activity Monitor to see what instructions certain threads are (Intel64 or Intel32?) but I just boot normally, not holding 6 and 4 like I understand is the way some newer Macs boot full 64-bit kernel.

eh. BOINC runs fine either way, since it is a universal Mac binary, and there is no differentiation between 32- and 64-bit like there is for Windows builds.