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Know your BIOS
Unless you have built your own system, or
changed the hard drive on your system...you may never have had to acces
your BIOS settings. Even though many people have not
taken a look at your BIOS, they may have a big impact on how the SETI
client will perform on your machine. Rat
Bastard's Benchmarking Page has started
to show that some of these settings *are* very important and have a big
influence on client performance. Last night I got direct evidence of such
influence.....by changing some of my BIOS settings to what was recommended
on the benchmarking page, i shaved 30
minutes off of my benchmark time. Every
minute counts....and as an added bonus, tweaking your BIOS settings may
just improve your overall computer's perfomance. If you have the
confidence to mess with your BIOS, then head on over to the Benchmarking
Page to find out how to improve things.
Dog at my Fiber Optic
Cable...er...I mean Homework
You may have noticed that the SETI servers
may have been down over the past couple of days.....well we have a reason
from the Berkeley Home Office:
November 5, 1999
Up until today, we regenerated some of the stats pages every hour. This
includes the totals, top 1000 users, cpu types, operating systems,
platforms, countries, and venue pages. However, the database has gotten
sufficiently large that it now takes over two hours to regenerate these
pages, causing multiple stats-page-processes to start before others are
finished. So now we're on a four hour schedule.
November 4, 1999
A fiber between campus and the Space Lab broke around 10:00am PST this
morning. Campus fixed it within three hours. During this time, both our
web server and data server were unreachable outside the lab.
We've cleaned up the top gaussians
page a bit. The bulk of the top gaussians were due to a single user who
apparently has a MIPS machine with a faulty floating point processor. (I
don't know of any properly functioning floating point processor that can
square a real number and get a negative result). The page now ignores
results with that user/platform combination. Other MIPS results should
not be affected.
November 2, 1999
Yesterday an unnamed film crew plugged a gigawatt of lighting equipment
into one of our uninterruptable power supplies. Not unexpectedly, it was
interrupted, temporarily bringing down the user database machine. At
about the same time on the science database machine one of the disks
failed. Thanks to RAID, the hot swap disk kicked in. Unfortunately the
hot swap also failed, revealing a more serious problem. It didn't
automatically kick over to the second hot swap. Today we rebooted the
science database machine which brought the second hot swap online. The
RAID controller worked as advertised and the science database kept
operating with just a momentary lapse and no data loss.
In addition to the server outages, the Club
Stats page hasnt been updated regularly over the past couple of days. This
only makes my job keeping stats here a bit tougher for me
:-(.
I personally hope that they get this straightened out soon.....whoops just
saw this on their page: "Personal
stats are updated immediately. The pages below are regenerated, at best,
every four hours. And due to a currently overloaded server, processing
group/domain stats sometimes takes days." BLAH.
This basically means that the Club Team stats i hvae been keeping may not
be current......aaaaah the pitfalls of trying to make daily stats updates!
Did You Know?
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Team Lamb Chop has 1377 Members. That
is about 1/300th of the active membes....and is about
1/1000th of the total members.
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Over my last 70 or so WUs
processed.....37%
of those WUs did not contain any gaussians.
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On average WUs that did not contain
gaussians were processed 47
min faster than WUs that contained at
least 1 gaussian.
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My new favorite word is "chuzzlenut"
New #2 SOON?
Team MacAddict added a
copule of new members today, and it seems that they brought along with
them quite a few WUs. This jump today put them in the passing lane, and
they should pass Team /.
most likely tomorrow for the #2 Club Team spot.
Team Lamb Chop News
If you mijssed it...mjdewitt
passed up cthulhu for the team #6 spot. Also there is a couple of hot and
heavy races in the top 20. C. Eric
Smith and Whiner
are neck and neck fighting it out for the #11 spot. Also further down,
there is a logjam at spots #14-20. All six of them are
looking quite parallel.....and only 122 WUs seperate the lot of them!
What a Novell Idea!
Have a Novell LAN just sitting there? Get
it running some SETI clients! A link provided from the main Ars site,
submitted by Sanctum
shows how you can rollout SETI on a Novell LAN. Take a look at it here.
Fallout.
Just what was the fallout of the team
member loss over the past two days? We lost another top 100 member today
with the lost of Mudboy. The three of them combined left with 13,085
work units.
How does this effect our chase to overtake
/. and MacAddict? With the loss of those work units we basically lost a 10
days with respect to /. and over a month to MacAddict. That is just in
pure numbers. Because of the sheer number of work units that guru and
davycroc processed, it will put us back a bit further. As of right now I
cant see Team Lamb Chop overtaking /. before the beginning of next year.
(hey...that would be a nice new years gift!).
Thread Bare
There was a problem with the Ars Technica Forums yesterday. One of the
casulties happened to be that the "unofficial" team thread ended
up being deleted. So right now if you try to click on the link on the menu
for it....it wont work. I will prolly start another thread sometime
today....dont know if i am going to get it linked up on the page here
today though.
Movin' on Up
Grimas
has overtook Caesar for the #14
spot.......and also Dr. Xing
passes up Uncomm0n for #16.
Black Monday?
Win some.....Lose some. Yesterday the team
got a big boost on the other teams ahead of us when the servers flushed
their backlog. Today we were dealt a big blow with the loss of the #1 and
#3 members of Team Lamb Chop. Team Lamb Chop is a team with alot of very
competitive members. Sometimes this competitive nature may give
way to higher authorities :-).
Both guru
and davycroc
have left Team Lamb Chop to put their effort towards their employer Sun
Microsystems. As I noted in yesterday's news, Sun has been passed
up this previous week by the Compaq SETI team. guru and davy are going to
put their efforts and machines into helping Sun regain the #2 overall
position.
Good luck guys and kick some butt! Thanks
for the ride while it lasted.
Now everyone take two steps forward! (except
you SouthPark...you only get one step!)
In other news
The SETI servers updated the stats are a weird time last night. That is
the reason why the numbers in the Club Team graphs seem low. The Team
rankings reflect the loss of guru and davycroc. The loss of the work units
in our team stats wont show up until tomorrow's update.
Hrmmmmmmmmmmm....
Well.....It looks like the SouthPark Admin
Crew isnt going down quietly. They have closed the gap on guru
and are just a shade under 100 WUs behind.
There may be a nasty fight brewing. But they better watch their backs
because davycroc keeps on
cranking out WUs at an incredible pace. He has moved past Panders and is
now at the team #3 spot. leech
is on the move again, he has passed up cthulhu and is now at
#6. Whiner pulls the
move on tron and is now up to #14. Grimas
looked like he was going to stretch out a double, but was only able to leg
out a single....passing up Beryllium for #16,
but he has Caesar in his sights and maybe will be #15 tomorrow.
Big Numbers
The backlog numbers went into effect today. Team
Lamb Chop pulled up quite nicely on both /. and MacAddict. With the
jump MacAddict is poised to overtake /.
sometime soon.....maybe this week if they can crank 'em out. When
will we pass /.? I am guessing sometime in the second
week of December. But again i could be wrong :-)
Weekly Stuff
On the Overall Team Front......SGI SETI
passed the 1 Million Work Unit Mark this
week. That is sure a bunch of work units. Compaq
passed up Sun for the #2 overall spot this
week. Team Lamb Chop is
still nestled in at the #9 team
overall....and the way it looks, we should be there for a while since
there doesnt appear to be any teams threatening our position.
On the Team front...davycrock
just plain scorched everyone else this week by posting.......3723
WUs for this week alone!. He was followed by guru
with 941 and SouthPark with 791. Top movers
of the week were Uncle Timbo
(+18), The Weeblows (+17) and elBeavis
moving up 14 spots. The top loser of the week was Trevize
who lost 9 spots over the week.
Addition
I added a small graph today. On the Daily
Team Stats Page, I added a graph below the
"difference" graph which shows just how many work units we have
gained or lost to /. and MacAddict.
- News
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