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    <title>SciLINC</title>
    <link>http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/</link>
    <description>BOINC project SciLINC: Main page News</description>
    <copyright>Missouri Botanical Garden</copyright>
    <lastBuildDate>Wed, 27 Jun 2007 05:05:33 GMT</lastBuildDate>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <image>
        <url>http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/rss_image.gif</url>
        <title>SciLINC</title>
        <link>http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/</link>
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<item>
            <title>Internal Testing, Scheduler Unavailable</title>
            <link>http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/all_news.php#17</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/all_news.php#17</guid>
            <description><![CDATA[Some internal tests are being run. So, the scheduler is temporarily
unavailable to those on the Internet.  This may cause some access
denied messages to show up in your BOINC manager.]]></description>
            <pubDate>Wed, 27 Jun 2007 05:01:00 GMT</pubDate>
            </item>
        <item>
            <title>SciLINC Update</title>
            <link>http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/all_news.php#16</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/all_news.php#16</guid>
            <description><![CDATA[When development of the SciLINC project began it had four primary
goals. Edited for brevity, they were:


	Increase public access to nationally significant
	scientific literature.

	Enhance the usefulness of digitized materials by
	creating a Web repository of scanned literature, keywords, and
	online resources with tools for searching and
	analysis.

	Create an educational tool for learning about plant
	life. While the screensaver application is indexing keywords,
	the participant's computer will display information about
	plant life within the United States and around the world. The
	information displayed will describe each plant name or term
	currently being indexed on the participant's computer, and
	will include descriptive data, images, maps, and the annotated
	outlinks for that term.

	Provide a model for adopting public-resource computing
	applications within the library community.


Botanicus is doing a
wonderful job of meeting goals 1 and 2 including processing data
generated by SciLINC. The project has certainly also meet goal 4.

We have learned much about grid-based, distributed,
public-resource computing applications and the
BOINC architecture. There
are thoughts and plans for analyses down the road that will be much
more computationally intensive than the original SciLINC analysis and
we look forward in time to bringing these projects to you.

While the amount of data that SciLINC has to analyze will increase
greatly in the days ahead it does not appear that increasing the
volume of information is going to improve the user experience of
running the SciLINC client.

It has been suggested that we repackage our data into single files
instead of uploading and downloading 50 files per workunit as we
currently do.  This suggestion has been heeded and implemented. We had
planned on doing it before SciLINC was rolled out but scheduling
prevented it and the community discovered the project before we were
ready to announce it. We expect that testing will show the repackaging
lessens the load placed upon the core BOINC client software.  But, it
does not change the amount of data being transferred.

The truth is that the workunits fly by so rapidly that
implementing goal 3 never became realistic.

When development of SciLINC began, the project lead's
understanding was that from a technological and economic standpoint it
makes sense to use public-resource computing in place of an internal
grid computing architecture whenever less than a gigabyte of data is
required per cpu-day of computation. Using the BOINC framework to
transfer the data to clients, SciLINC meets this volume-of-computation
guideline.

However, our brief experience with the dedicated BOINC community
over the last couple weeks has shown that, to the community these
numbers may differ somewhat. In its original form SciLINC would have
needed to transfer roughly 250MiB of compressed data in order to
occupy a modern CPU for a day. This would expand to nearly 660MiB of
input data. Then the client would need to upload about 44MiB of
results which would compress to 17MiB. These numbers have only grown
as SciLINC has been improved and made more efficient.

This is not acceptable to the average BOINC user.

Looking at the numbers from the perspective of someone on dial-up,
if they set SciLINC to only 1% of their BOINC time, this would be
roughly 15 minutes out of a day. For this 15 minutes they would have
needed to download around 2.5MiB of data. This may not be a huge issue
for broadband users, but if someone is on dial-up (as we have learned
many BOINC fans still are) the transfer time would exceed the
computation time.

So, where are we now?

Even if the transfer:credit ratios were acceptable to the
community, we do not have enough data to realistically occupy hundred
or thousands of BOINC enthusiasts for a lengthy period of time.  As we
have already seen on various community boards a relatively small
amount of credit is earned for a comparatively large load on their
system resources. Any computational and transport related improvements
that have been tested have only resulted in more data needing to be
transferred.

As stated above, we are investigating the possibility of
performing much more computationally intensive analyses in the months
ahead. It is expected that these will be a much better fit for a BOINC
project than the current task of text-indexing and taxonomic analysis
which has a relatively low mathematical complexity.

Because of this it has been decided that for now all SciLINC
computation will be performed internally. When we have something with
a better credit-reward ratio (and nicer screensaver) it will be made
available to the community.

Thank you again for your interest and support. We look forward to
working with you in the future.

The SciLINC Team
This has been 
cross-posted to the forums
for discussion and feedback.]]></description>
            <pubDate>Fri, 22 Jun 2007 15:39:00 GMT</pubDate>
            </item>
        <item>
            <title>Brief Outage Resolved</title>
            <link>http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/all_news.php#15</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/all_news.php#15</guid>
            <description><![CDATA[We experienced a short time down this morning.  MySQL was accidentally
shutdown for about 40 minutes.  Everything should be back to normal
now.]]></description>
            <pubDate>Thu, 21 Jun 2007 16:20:00 GMT</pubDate>
            </item>
        <item>
            <title>User Profile Image Uploading Fixed</title>
            <link>http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/all_news.php#14</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/all_news.php#14</guid>
            <description><![CDATA[User profile images should now upload properly.  Thank you
 Zain Upton and
 Paul@home for bringing this
to our attention.

The details are in
 a message on our
 Question and Answer forums.]]></description>
            <pubDate>Wed, 20 Jun 2007 16:38:00 GMT</pubDate>
            </item>
        <item>
            <title>Forums Online </title>
            <link>http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/all_news.php#13</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/all_news.php#13</guid>
            <description><![CDATA[The forums are now online.  Please use the Question and Answers section for
reporting any bugs or problems.  There is also a special message board
for general discussion.

We will be checking them in the morning.  For now... sleep.]]></description>
            <pubDate>Wed, 20 Jun 2007 07:07:00 GMT</pubDate>
            </item>
        <item>
            <title>Database Back Online </title>
            <link>http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/all_news.php#12</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/all_news.php#12</guid>
            <description><![CDATA[The database is back on-line.  We have disabled the sending of new
work units and will be monitoring the system to see what happens.

Fortunately only one table of one database was corrupted.
Unfortunately it was the SciLINC results table.  This will probably
result in no credit being granted for the results that are pending
being reported and we apologize for that.

More information will be posted tomorrow.]]></description>
            <pubDate>Wed, 20 Jun 2007 04:30:00 GMT</pubDate>
            </item>
        <item>
            <title>Corruption Caused by Electrical Problems </title>
            <link>http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/all_news.php#11</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/all_news.php#11</guid>
            <description><![CDATA[We have finished our examination and remote analysis of the main
SciLINC server. This lead us to believe that it was the victim of
electrical problems.  It was later confirmed that there were some
transient electrical issues on Saturday in the building where the
machine is housed.

Binary junk was found written across a number of log files on this
server. Those files belong to various SciLINC processes, MySQL, Apache
and the Linux Kernel itself all around 7:02 PM local time Saturday the
16th.  That's UTC 00:02 Sunday the 17th.  This coincides with a
"disturbance in the force" that knocked a number of other machines
offline over the weekend as well.

These things should not happen, but they do.  There are plans to
move the machine to a better location in the next couple of weeks.

At this point we are filing bug reports, as requested in the log
files, since MySQL is unable to recover from the transaction logs that
are present.  As soon as this is done we will be attempting recovery
of the database and then work on getting the project back on-line.

We will keep you posted and thank you for your continued support.]]></description>
            <pubDate>Mon, 18 Jun 2007 22:30:00 GMT</pubDate>
            </item>
        <item>
            <title>New Account Creation Temporarily Disabled </title>
            <link>http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/all_news.php#10</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/all_news.php#10</guid>
            <description><![CDATA[New account creation has been temporarily disabled until we can iron
out some of the issues that we are having.

If you really must have an account or want to
help us test fixes to the CPU loading problem send us
an email requesting one and after things are back up we will try
to respond.]]></description>
            <pubDate>Mon, 18 Jun 2007 16:05:00 GMT</pubDate>
            </item>
        <item>
            <title>SciLINC Causing High CPU Load </title>
            <link>http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/all_news.php#9</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.scilinc.org/SciLINC/all_news.php#9</guid>
            <description><![CDATA[AlphaLaser and other users on the

BOINCstats forums and the

BOINC forums have brought to our attention an issue where the
large number of files being served up for each workunit are causing
high CPU loads in the core BOINC client.

Augustine found a partial workaround to this.  It is

discussed on BOINCstats as well.

After the database is back on-line we will be looking into
correcting this issue.]]></description>
            <pubDate>Mon, 18 Jun 2007 13:26:00 GMT</pubDate>
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