Contest: September DC!

[frvge]

Hi all,

The Project Stealth team would like to invite you to join in becoming the most powerful supercomputer on Earth. How? It's fairly simple basically. It's called 'Distributed Computing.'

Distributed Computing projects are usually scientific projects in order to solve insanely complex problems. For these projects, a lot of volunteers are donating some power of their PC in order to crack the problem. With a few volunteers a project can last thousands of years. With a thousand volunteers the project can be done in one year. With hundred thousand, in less than a week.

The Project Stealth team has decided to join in some of these projects and has decided to make a subgroup. What's that? All DCs have extensive statistics pages. These pages show you how well you do by means of a ranking per team/subteam/overall and more. The goal is to get the most points and thus rank in the top, or preferably in first place.

The projects we chose are:
Folding@Home which tries to find cures to Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many cancers and cancer-related syndromes.
This project comes in two flavours: CPU and GPU. We advise the GPU, since it gets more points.
More information on their site

Seventeen or Bust is a brute-force attack on an unproven mathematical problem. More information can be found at their wiki, since it's a bit mathy. ;)

How to enter Folding@Home (ATI X2xxx-series and nVidia 8xxx-series and up ONLY)
1: Go to the High Performance site and download the GPU client. (click the first Windows logo for the tray-version)
2: Install
3: Configure the client like this:
username: DPC_Stealth0[here your personal nickname].
Mind the 0 (zero), which is a separator between the subteam (Stealth) name and your own name. As an example, my username is DPC_Stealth0frvge . Mind the capitalization of 'DPC' and 'Stealth.'
Team number: 92 .
Click ok, and it should connect to the server to get work. You might have some firewall popups; just allow it.
4: Right-click the colorful icon in the system tray and hit 'Display.' You should see your configuration details like you name. If it says 'Core is not running', just wait a bit. It's possible it is currently downloading the data.

If you have problems installing, please check out http://folding.stanford.edu/English/WinGPUGuide for more information.

How to enter Seventeen or Bust
1: Sign-up at http://www.seventeenorbust.com/signup/ .
2: Log-in and set up your preferences
3: Use the Team Affiliation screen to set-up Dutch Power Cows as team.
4: Go to http://seventeenorbust.com/download/ and download and install the client for your OS.
5: Run the client and hit 'Config'. Input up your previously chosen nickname here. If you want you can put 'DutchPowerCows' as your team here, but this does not really influence the team-settings (only step 2 does!!).
6: Go to http://sob.qik.nl and register. This is done manually, so you might have to wait a bit till you are accepted.
7: Log-in with the password that was sent and set your team to DPC_Stealth.
8: Done

The Contest
So after we've set everything up, it's time for... the Contest of October! You can win a copy of the highly acclaimed SCCT Coop Stealth Walkthroughs by Prerage.com . (more info).
From time to time, you can win another prize instead of the sneakpeek, like this month. To be announced. ;)

Past Contests
September: Sneakpeek of ....

Rules/Tips/Guidelines:
- Get as many points as you can for the projects.
- Use as many CPUs/GPUs as you can, as long as you have permission to use them.
- Someone who won once, can't win the sneakpeek-prize until 3 months have passed. This is to prevent that one person who's got a lot of computing power gets all the sneakpeeks.
- Try to get non-PS-fan friends to join under your name, so you get extra points!
- You can also use the F@H CPU versions along with the GPU, for extra points.
- You can run multiple F@H GPU versions (check out the F@H forums)
- The date for each sneakpeek is determined after the results are in and is subject to change. Depends if we have stuff to show ;).
- Sneakpeek can be multimedia or new information in the form of text, like an unannounced announcement.

Way of grading:
An average deviation of both projects will be calculated and the top-2 of the persons who's sum of those deviations is highest, will get a sneakpeek at some of the unpublished things we're working on. The info/media you see in the sneakpeek is not meant to be discussed, neither privately nor publically, until the Project Stealth Team releases it by means of a Tick Tock (or equivalent) thread. If you break this confidentiality, actions will be taken. The way of grading can be changed in between months without notification, or the grading can be simplified. Overall, we decide who the winners are. Sneakpeeks will change in 'value'. One month it might be a cool new video, another month it might be something that you personally don't like.

So for now: happy folding and SoB-ing. See you in one month :)

Project Stealth Team

[Bionic-Blob]

We advise the GPU, since it gets more points.

as evidenced here ;)

[Tidenburg]

I've got it on my ps3 but never turn it on. Could I join the PS group if I did?

[frvge]

There should be something you can do in the config-menu, but I don't know anything about the PS3, other than that it's output for F@H is really nice ;)

[Aj]

At first, I read that as saying "disturbed computing". :/

[Succubus Dryad Of The Undying Comet]

Not fair - I have a sucky PC.

[frvge]

Well, the SoB-client and the normal CPU client for F@H work fine. Just not so fast... but that can be countered by using multiple PCs. Which is the goal in the first place.

[frvge]

The first statistics are in :) We were 250th place of the subteams yesterday, but 12 hours later, we're already 243th :) With a few more members, we can get top-150 easily overall and top-30 daily.

[frvge]

F@H news: DPC_Stealth just passed the 10000 points milestone, with current members Lucy, aj and myself. Freeman also joined but hasn't submitted a result yet, I think.
The SoB team unfortunately needs more members. There's only me there.

[Gawain]

i guess its easier to persuade people into helping research for disease cures than solving some weird mathematical problem XD

[frvge]

Most of the results of the mathematical problems can be used to optimize some things, be it the perfect measurement between highly sofisticated equipment in extremely sensitive projects. For example, the new particle accelerator's trajectories could be further optimized. And many more things like better MRI-scans, microscopes and so on.

[Aj]

How do we check the status of the team?

I go to the DPC team stats site, but I can't find fridge, lucy, or myself.

[frvge]

The individual stats per subteammember can be found
http://kakaostats.com/t.php?t=92&search_text=DPC_Stealth&filter=active (click your name for more details).
The subteams' total ranking (all subteams, all points gathered) can be found http://kakaostats.com/subteam.php?t=92 . Current ranking as of this writing is 219th.

For the _current_ daily stats, http://tadah.mine.nu/?prefix=fah&datum=2008-09-04&tabel=memberoffset .
If you select the checkbox for DPC_Stealth and click the 'Graph' button above, you can see our growth in _daily_ output (not cumulative!). So as long as we keep growing, we are doing better and better and better. Actually, we were 13th place daily of DPC yesterday. I don't know how much that is for the total amount of users, but it's definately good :)

[frvge]

We just broke into tenth place of the daily stats for DPC. That's a great achievement! Let's continue being in top-10, and with some more people joining our team, we can rank even higher.

Current members: frvge, Lucy, aj.

[frvge]

We got the 20000 points milestone as a team today and RobertFreeman has joined us.
Also, the 5.422 points yesterday are good for a ninth place in the daily stats of DPC :D Keep it up.