After an initial very interesting couple of months, modestly crunching away on five programmes, this 70 year old Newbie (is there anybody out there over 60?)would be grateful for an experienced eye to check me over to see if my credit gains are as they should be?
Thanks.

Hi sturap,

Can you tell us which projects you crunch for? Or is it as it shows here that you crunch for Seti, Climateprediction.net, Einstein and Rosetta (plus possibly MalariaControl.net)?

(You don't show up on Boincstats.com, possibly because you use a different username on Malaria)

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Hi Jord,

Also linked up to Seti B Test & Malaria Control under my full name Stuart Raperport. Cannot understand how that happend! Was with Climate Prediction but found it ultra slow and rarely acquired credits. Am now running 24/7 on all
projects on my 1.6 cpu - am I up to speed?

Thanks
Sturap

I think you are. Although there have been some changes off late on Einstein and Seti, so perhaps that others think you're not doing well. ;-)

CPDN runs slow, yes. Those models take a good 3 months when run alone on a dedicated system. They trickle once every running year (in the application, not in real time). I'm sure MikeMarsUK or mo.v will be here quickly enough to explain it completely.

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As Ageless says, the work unit for CPDN is very long, but uploads its progress every model year (anywhere from 9 hours to 48 hours in real time, depending on the speed of your PC).

It sounds like something was preventing your climate model from running successfully - particular antivirus programmes, firewall configurations, etc can cause problems. If you feel like giving it another go in the future, drop us a line at the CPDN forum and we'll do the best we can to help.

Many participants and moderators at CPDN are retired, so your age is not unusual :-)

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Many participants and moderators at CPDN are retired, so your age is not unusual :-)

Which begs the question, Mike, what you are? Just old? ;-)

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Only 40, and not retired, so I buck the trend :-)

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Hi Stuart

I've found your computer details and model results on cpdn:

http://climateapps2.oucs.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/results.php?hostid=541464

Your computer is right on the minimum specifications for running these climate models - the CPU is 1.6GHz, which more or less determines the processing speed, and has 512Mb of memory, which is what you need for each model. So that's not a problem. However, this isn't a super-fast computer (yours does 5.3 climate model timesteps per minute) and at that speed you are unlikely to complete one of these 160-year simulations in less than about 10 months, even if the climate model is the only project you run and you let the computer work on it 24/7. Only the occasional break for rebooting, scans and so on, and the odd short holiday for you!

Now there's nothing wrong with that, and I have an old slower computer that has been working on a single climate model for over a year. I'll miss my deadline, but that doesn't matter because cpdn ignores the deadline as long as the computer trickles without a break of more than 6 weeks.

But my slow computer is ONLY crunching cpdn. If you want to crunch workunits for a variety of other projects, you may well decide that your computer just hasn't got time to do one of these massively long climate simulations as well. If you come to this conclusion, you could

*in the Projects tab, set cpdn to get 'No new work'
*abort your current cpdn model
*stay attached to cpdn (ie don't detach from it) and periodically keep an eye on the cpdn news thread to see whether shorter climate models have been launched

http://www.climateprediction.net/board/viewforum.php?f=36&sid=806ae23ddc0d17c0a0f483144d879054

If you continue your current climate model or come back to cpdn in the future, you'll need to think about how to prevent your models crashing. My link to your results page shows that you've had 13 models of which 11 have crashed, 9 with -2 exit codes and two with a -107 error code. If you click on the Result ID numbers in the left-hand column, you see details of what happened to each model.

There are ways to prevent these model crashes, so if you tell us that you're going to continue with cpdn (or if you return when there are shorter models available), we will point you to the cpdn advice you need.

The workunits for other projects are much less likely to crash, if only because they're so much shorter. Whichever projects you run, I'd advise you to disable the screensaver (it slows the processing down and makes -107 crashes more likely) and view the graphics when you have time by using the button in your boinc manager.

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