The Scottish Boinc Team

Name: Green&Healthy@CrisesKiller #2
Project: World Community Grid
Issued by: Crises Killer
Start time: 2010-10-15 00:00 GMT
End time: 2010-10-22 00:00 GMT

http://boincstats.com/bam/challengeChat.php?chid=85

12.5 hours until this challenge starts. Hope everyone is ready. :)

MacDitch wrote:12.5 hours until this challenge starts. Hope everyone is ready. :)

It's started. I'll email the troops. Time to make a bid for my "Help Fight Childhood Cancer" sapphire badge.

BTW, WCG might be an arm of the big pharmaceutical companies but you you must admire their spin and huptzpa: Just who is going to quibble with a mission statement like "Help Fight Childhood Cancer"? Who would say to the world, "Actually I think finding new prime numbers or testing some obscure mathematical conjecture is a bit more worthwhile."?

Megacruncher wrote:

MacDitch wrote:12.5 hours until this challenge starts. Hope everyone is ready. :)

It's started. I'll email the troops. Time to make a bid for my "Help Fight Childhood Cancer" sapphire badge.

BTW, WCG might be an arm of the big pharmaceutical companies but you you must admire their spin and huptzpa: Just who is going to quibble with a mission statement like "Help Fight Childhood Cancer"? Who would say to the world, "Actually I think finding new prime numbers or testing some obscure mathematical conjecture is a bit more worthwhile."?

Yep, that's true... but then Neuroblastoma like Lupus is a low profile disease. Even if it is one of the more common forms of cancer in children there are not enough patients... with money, so Pharmaceutical companies aren't really interested in investing too much in cures. Which is the reason why it gets the BOINC treatment and is not a top secret research project using mainframe supercomputing prime time. This way it gets a lot of publicity and it's good for image given the high emotional impact... But then, who cares about that, if they find a cure or a better treatment that's all that's really important... apart from making it available to everyone....

Thinking about Lupus whatever happened to "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"... ?

I agree - progress is progress and is a good thing regardless of whoever brings it about and whatever their motivation.

All the same, I was a little put off WCG in pre BOINC days. It was called United Devices then and I used to very occasionally crunch for it when SETI was down and I'd exhausted my caches. The thing that put me off was that I won some lottery they did and got £75. Usually when I get money I'm quite happy but this offended me. It wasn't why I crunched, and it high-lighted the fact that UD had significant commercial interests backing it and I didn't like that they were using filthy lucre to incentivise the distributed computing community to crunch for them rather than SETI or whatever else was around then.

I wouldn't feel too bad about it. It's not uncommon for charities and the like to raise money for their projects through lotteries. These days they just send you an e-Mail if you stop boincing for WCG which, on the whole, is less offensive.

... mind you, prime numbers aren't entirely useless. Apart from cryptography and Aardvark's toaster a certain species of cicada seems to have a use for them: http://www.di.unito.it/~remond/Ric/Remo ... SM2005.pdf....

As a long-time (albeit off-and-on) WCG cruncher, the thing that always offended me was that a large number of their 'disease' projects are oriented more towards identifying a drug than determining the cause and/or cure. Though, as several have already pointed out, it's a big pharma backed site. Well, I suppose none of us is perfect.

I'm staying well away from discussions about the validity of work being done....

Midway(ish) through the challenge and it looks like we have a safe 6th (out of 30) place. Current Top Ten is:

L'Alliance Francophone 1 1,231,030
Team China 2 967,903
BOINC@Poland 3 655,040
AMD Users 4 285,555
Facebook 5 134,423
The Scottish Boinc Team 6 64,616
Amateur Radio Operators 7 47,035
Outer Marker 8 35,213
Central New York 9 28,823
shorepower 10 14,964

Indeed with 2 days to go 6th looks like a pretty solid bet.

Not bad if you consider that we are down to 153rd by TC for WCG or 228th by RAC . Good to know we can still rise to the occasion even if thereafter we can't keep it up for very long, as it were, so to speak.

Lets see if we can get 5th in next weeks WCG Challenge!

MacDitch wrote:Lets see if we can get 5th in next weeks WCG Challenge!

... With Spinhenge, RNA, NFS and Docking challenges all running over the same period....... Tricky ..... 8)

PinkPenguin wrote:

MacDitch wrote:Lets see if we can get 5th in next weeks WCG Challenge!

... With Spinhenge, RNA, NFS and Docking challenges all running over the same period....... Tricky ..... 8)

I've got both my work machine and my home machine cache-ing for next week, should help a little! Unfortunately, I also have a large quantity of Docking to upload from work and it can't wait until the challenge - bad planning or what!?

We're into the last 18 hours of this challenge and I think it safe to say 6th place is ours. Stick your machines on 'Network Activity Suspended' and save those results for tomorrow! :)

That's it all wrapped up and, as predicted, we finished safely it sixth.

Top ten round-up:

L'Alliance Francophone 1 2,330,658
Team China 2 1,780,391
BOINC@Poland 3 1,246,151
AMD Users 4 540,970
Facebook 5 273,096
The Scottish Boinc Team 6 165,336
Amateur Radio Operators 7 96,533
Central New York 8 53,112
Outer Marker 9 44,177
shorepower 10 30,203

Now on to the three challenges that started this morning!