This thread is now way off topic, and is becoming hostile.
Any more posts like the last few, and I\'ll delete the thread.

My post politely chastised a particular moderator for their tone and it was deleted. I would like to know why it was deleted (perhaps I left too much of the quoted material in?). I would also like to be reassured that it was not the chastised moderator who did the actual deleting.

Scot

I did the deleting. (And it took a long time :( )
Your post, and a lot of others, was deleted because it wasn\'t relevant to the thread title, and referenced other posts which were deleted.
I also deleted some of mine for the same reason, along with perfectly reasonable posts by others for the same reason.

There is a list of posting rules to the left of the post composing window, several of which were being violated.
The reason the moderators were created for these BOINC boards, (and the Admins on the php board), is to remove \"socially unacceptable\" posts.

My post politely chastised a particular moderator for their tone and it was deleted. I would like to know why it was deleted (perhaps I left too much of the quoted material in?). I would also like to be reassured that it was not the chastised moderator who did the actual deleting.

So, Scott, if some moderator other than the chastised moderator posts that it was s/he who deleted your poast then you will be satisfied? Or will you then ask for proof that the moderator does not have 2 identities here, 1 identity being the identity you chastised, the other identity being the moderator who claims it was he who deleted and not the chastised identity?

Scott, have you ever paused to ask yourself if there are limits to what any of us can possibly know? In other words, maybe there are certain things we mortals can never know for certain? And maybe we should prioritise and focus on the stuff we can know and not sweat over the small stuff? Else people just shake their heads whenever we speak and mutter \"yep, another flaming k00k\"?

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There is a list of posting rules to the left of the post composing window, several of which were being violated.
The reason the moderators were created for these BOINC boards, (and the Admins on the php board), is to remove \"socially unacceptable\" posts.

First of all, thanks for at least standing up for your decision and posting it.

However, if my Posting was \"socially unacceptable\", then either my perception of my own social skills are completely bogus or we simply have heavily different definitions regarding the matter.

My 70th Posting here shall be my last one and I won\'t be around any longer.

Cya all around and good luck with the Project... You will need it.

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Scientific Network : 44800 MHz - 77824 MB - 1970 GB

Your decision FalconFly.
However, it\'s this sentance in my post that applies to your post:

Your post, and a lot of others, was deleted because it wasn\'t relevant to the thread title, and referenced other posts which were deleted.

(And the first word here does NOT apply to you in particular.)

Most of your post was mostly about backups, as were a lot of other posts.
As I said in one of MY deleted posts regarding your models:

I had a look at the errors for the models on your currently visible computers, and I\'ve never seen those error codes before.

Your computer doesn\'t appear to like the Fortran code of this project.

Good luck with the other projects, in particular Malaria. It\'s a worthy cause.

mo.v
No, I wasn\'t referring to the April flaw but the switch on a sulphur parameter in the 5.15 models compared to the 5.08 models that shows different output

Carl said some half year ago that implementing 40-year models would take about 2 weeks of full time work to do
I guess, and I guess this would be the same kind of software that can restore all the crashed models?

The 160 year model was just one option when the coupled model was ironed out
I think that was a mistake

A normal human beeing wants to finish a given task :)

My 70th Posting here shall be my last one and I won\'t be around any longer.

Cya all around and good luck with the Project... You will need it.

Falcon Fly\'s computers are Linux. Until recently, Linux users got screwed on credits at almost every project except CPDN. Many Linux users decided to crunch CPDN so they would get fair credits.

That was the situation less than a year ago. Now the game has taken a 180 degree turn. Many projects are now giving fixed credits so Linux users don\'t have to crunch CPDN to get fair credits anymore. Another reason Linux crunchers, including Clownius, are leaving CPDN is so they can crunch over at ABC using ABC\'s lightning fast 64-bit app and earn credits so fast it makes your head spin. Yes, now the truth is coming out.

Once again, we see the kooks and whiners are not what they want you to think they are. Once again, we see that the right thing for CPDN to do is to speed up their application so crunchers can earn lots of credits here at CPDN too. CPDN has to remain competitive with regard to credits.

Yep, any way you care to look at it, the kook solution (ignore optimising the code, just chop the models into smaller chunks) is the wrong solution. Yet we hear them whining the same nonsense over and over and flouncing out in a hissy fit on the flimsiest of pretexts... \"if my posts are socially unacceptable, yada, yada, yada\"

Yes, Falcon Fly, your stoopidity IS socially unacceptable.

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It appears to be starting all over again.
Enough is enough.

Dagorath, PLEASE, for the sake of the project and your fellow crunchers, STOP this stupidity. This thread has already been heavily moderated, do you want it to get locked too?

And this will be my last post in this thread, I actually hope it will get deleted completely...

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Proud owner of the CPDN Wow-Mug!

Dagorath, PLEASE, for the sake of the project and your fellow crunchers, STOP this stupidity. This thread has already been heavily moderated, do you want it to get locked too?

And this will be my last post in this thread, I actually hope it will get deleted completely...

I didn\'t start the stoopidity in this thread. When kooks and whiners choose to do the right thing and stop their kook whining for the sake of this project then I\'ll shut up.

Les can delete/lock this thread if he wants to, no problem. They can block my addy if they want to, no problem, I\'ll just post from a different addy, they\'re cheap like borscht.

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Dagorath

Using words like: kooks, whiners, etc is what the rules ban, at least in my interpretation.
[quote]
No messages whose only intention is to annoy or antagonize other people.
No messages that are deliberately hostile or insulting.
[quote]

I\'s not possible for a moderator to edit other peoples posts, or to lock a thread.
We can:
Delete a post
Delete a thread
Ban an account from posting for 30 days.

The last one has only been used twice, both times on the BBC boards, and only after extensive discussion with all of the moderators and administrators, lasting I think a week.

This thread is about plans for shorter WUs, NOT about why other people should leave, or personal feelings about others.

Scot

I did the deleting. (And it took a long time :( )
Your post, and a lot of others, was deleted because it wasn\'t relevant to the thread title, and referenced other posts which were deleted.
I also deleted some of mine for the same reason, along with perfectly reasonable posts by others for the same reason...

Les,

Thank you for your reply. I understand and do not disagree. However, given that there appears to be no other way to make such a comment (e.g., the red X on other projects, a generalized mod e-mail, etc.) outside of starting another thread which would seem to be a bit excessive, exactly how would one go about making a complaint about moderator behavior on this project?

At the risk of yet another string of posts on the matter of \"too many boards\", I\'d recommend the original, \"classic\", php board, once called the Community board, but now called Message Board.
People do need to register there as well, but so what? There\'s thousands of unrelated boards on the net, a lot of them php based.

Think of this set as the \"business\" boards, and the php one as the \"after hours, disco/cafe/etc\" board.

The php board has the advantage that private messages can be sent to other members, and that the core team visit there frequently. And can also be PMd.
It also has a lot more sub categories in which to post.
If someone posts a public complaint there, it gets to be read by ALL of the mods, admins, and a few of the core team, (as well as the public), and gets discussed by all 3 lots. (As well as the public.)
Complaints have been made in PMs to the core team before this, so it\'s nothing new.

Dagorath

Using words like: kooks, whiners, etc is what the rules ban, at least in my interpretation.
[quote]
No messages whose only intention is to annoy or antagonize other people.
No messages that are deliberately hostile or insulting.
[quote]

That, my dear Lester, is precisely my point. I really can\'t believe the kooks and whiners are posting their nonsense out of concern for this project. Their kook solution is so completely riddled with holes even fish laugh at it. Nobody can actually be that stoopid and remember to breath. So... their only intention for posting that crap is to antagonise and annoy other people. They do it deliberately, They do it repeatedly in the face of all reason which I find to be aa very hostile kind of behavior. So ban them for 30 days.

Anybody who threatens to quit this project just because of something I\'ve said obviously has very little loyalty to this project to begin with. Ban their butts outta here for 30 days!!

And this bit about personal feelings... I\'l try hard to not call them kooks and whiners if they try hard not to be kooks and whiners. How often does it have to be said before it actually sinks in? Ban them for 30 days!!

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From the point of view of a project, issuing credits is a means to an end and not an end in itself: it is hard to imagine what purpose would be served by a project that had the sole objective of issuing credits.

The project objective is, perhaps, to maximise a function of the form:

total-work = number-of-crunchers * work-rate * time-in-project

If this is true then the project\'s objectives can be achieved either by maximising the number of crunchers, the work rate or retention. An improvement in application performance will increase total work by increasing work rate and has the additional attraction that all crunchers benefit equally. Maximising the number of crunchers is a more difficult task, since crunchers are not identical in work rate or motivation.

Promiscuous Crunchers
The promiscuous cruncher cares no more about the purpose of the project than about a brand of toothpaste and is attracted by the rate at which credits can be accumulated. To attract the promiscuous cruncher the project needs to increase that rate. One way of doing this is to increase the performance of the application so that credits (which are some function of work) increase: total work then increases doubly, as the work rate increases and so does the number of crunchers. Since the essence of promiscuity is a lack of commitment, the size of the work unit matters - people may not care about what toothpaste they use, but will usually invest more effort in choosing a 20-year mortgage, or a car. CPDN is unusual in having very large work units, which may act as a \'barrier to entry\', and it is possible therefore that decreasing the work unit size could help attract all sorts of crunchers.

Idealistic Crunchers
BOINC projects vary in their aims and several are idealistic. Climate prediction combines a large stock of work with a problem domain that is of concern to the public at large. To be concerned about climate change you do not have to have a scientific background or well-developed IT skills. If, as CPDN has done, a project targets this potentially enormous and growing group, then it can increase the number of crunchers, but at the cost of a reduced effective work rate. From a credit point of view, a user who continuously downloads and crashes models may contribute almost as much as a user who downloads and processes a single model, but the large work unit size means that not all trickles are equal: 160 models submitting one trickle and crashing are not as useful as a model that submits 160 trickles. Smaller work units are very likely to increase the contribution of this group and retention within the project.


It seems to me that only the project has the information to decide which approach maximises their work: the self-centred credit tart may fail to appreciate the potential recruitment opportunities that a user-friendly project would create; the PC-loathing idealist (like me) might be more trouble than he\'s worth.

just some quick points I\'d like to make:

a) 64-bit does not necessarily mean \"faster\"

b) \"faster\" does not always mean \"better\" (i.e. models can have the physics \"optimized away\" if people don\'t do the boring work of really checking what is going on, whether it\'s climate modelling or something else) --- maybe they won\'t admit it, but every BOINC project leader I talked with (i.e. all of \'em ;-) moans about crazy credit-mad overclockers who are just in it for speed. Does nobody realize that the first thing to go (based on data of thousands of workunits) is the FPU which is why \"redundant computing\" is so big (on climate models, these guys would just crash after a few days anyway)?

c) if the 2-3 CPDN developers read the boards as much as some people wanted, we\'d never have time to do the 6 or 7 apps we\'ve done over the past few years. I don\'t think any other project, including pretty much every other one that has far more staff & equipment than us, has done as many apps as we have. And soon we\'ll be doing a 64-bit latest-and-greatest-state-of-the-art HadGAM1 model from the MetOffice (that should be out in a year or so).

d) Thank god for moderators who answer 99.99% of the questions and help 99.999% of the users and just email me when I don\'t notice the servers are on fire! ;-)

e) climate models are primarily 64-bit, but the number of 64-bit machines out there is still pretty tiny (although as I said we\'re doing a 64-bit model in a year).

f) the labor in porting a 1-2 million line climate model is not a linear jump from the other apps out there that are maybe 10-100K lines!

g) we\'re already beta-testing shorter workunits (40 yrs, the standard will probably be 80 years) which among other things have:

h) I\'ve optimized the code quite a bit (compiler optimizations) and still get sensible results (people are reporting 1 and \"sub-1\" second per timestep)

i) I don\'t think any other workunit will ever approach the 160 year one, except perhaps ocean spinups in the future (a side-project for the dedicated cruncher/enthusiast)

j) I figured out a sensible way to do temp files so that file/disk I/O is reduced 92% (i.e. the dreaded tmp/cache2 and aswap/oswap files that are written to 5 times a second it seems)

k) credits are OK but overrated IMHO --- doing what typically only clusters through supercomputers do on your home PC or laptop is far more interesting to me, not to mention running an entire global climate model (and soon -- an embedded regional model!)

OK, now time to get some sleep as the lager is wearing off... ;-)

And soon we\'ll be doing a 64-bit latest-and-greatest-state-of-the-art HadGAM1 model from the MetOffice (that should be out in a year or so).

g) we\'re already beta-testing shorter workunits (40 yrs, the standard will probably be 80 years) which among other things have [...]

I promised not to reply any more to this thread, but this is simply too good news to leave ignored!!!

While I had decided to quit this project because of the large work units, I\'ll just make it a pause instead until the above is ready :-)

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Proud owner of the CPDN Wow-Mug!

Kenneth, yes, it\'s great news, offers a little for everyone.

Sorry to hear you\'re leaving for a while but glad to hear you\'ll be back. Like they say, a change is as good as a rest, no shame at all. Put your \'puters to work where they work best. With so many projects these days it\'s not hard to find one that\'s just right for you.

In the meantime, there are lots of folks who find CPDN is perfect for them and more new people join everyday. Not all of them stay but some do. I know I\'ll be here for a while so don\'t you worry about taking a break. We\'ll get through these long models one way or another.

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This thread is about shorter WUs.
It\'s a fine concept that probably need an audience.

Unfortunately some posters here (worst example the absolutely arrogant dago-rat) just use it for theor trolling about other users.

Could the mods please go on deleting such posts like the lats couple of him/her, they definitely don\'t fit the definition of:

# No messages whose only intention is to annoy or antagonize other people.
# No messages whose only intention is to hijack a thread.
# No messages that are deliberately hostile or insulting.

They are all of it.

If you want\'s to rant about other crunchers, please go to the cafe or bugger of at all, don\'t hijach this thread.

@moderators:
Please feel free to delete this post along the other ones not fit in here.

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Grüße vom Sänger

However, if my Posting was \"socially unacceptable\", then either my perception of my own social skills are completely bogus or we simply have heavily different definitions regarding the matter.

My 70th Posting here shall be my last one and I won\'t be around any longer.

Cya all around and good luck with the Project... You will need it.

Hallo FalyonFly,

Unfortunately I only can read my own deleted posts, your\'s are hidden.

Afaik your post was perfectly fine and nothing against the rules in it (unless you cited the ranter dago-rat). It was about back-ups, and this fit\'s imho even fuine in this thread about short WUs, as long WUs and backups seem to go together.

If the powers that be don\'t like these issues be discussed in the same thread, they should start a new one and move (or at least quote) your post in a new thread, not simply delete it. This removal/quotation worked a bit over @Rosetta in the times of the credit wars with the cheaters.

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Grüße vom Sänger