Hi,

A first glance at the top participants page suggests that the top 20 alone have about 2000 cores on offer - 2% of the search space should be done per week. The reality is < .5%/week.
Looking closer at the top 20 shows that many figures appear (semi)static, foremost the total credit. Something seems very wrong here.

Lasse

Thanks for your question.
We will look into the problem and try to get back to you next week.

Dear Lasse,

After looking into the problem you raised, we got the following:

First, our benchmark was done on a personal computer equipped with the CPU, Intel(R) Xeon(R) E5520 @ 2.27GHz, which can get about 540 credits every core-day, far higher than 200 credits.

Second, the "Recent average credit" in the sudoku statistics page is not correct as it shows.
When we look at the "Recent average credit" on top 20 of our project, the sum of the recent average credits is about 500000 per day.
However, according to the website BOINCstats, http://boincstats.com/stats/project_graph.php?pr=sudvt
our project has about 32,000,000 credits in total on 4/28, and has about 40,000,000 credits in total on 5/21.
Therefore, our project gets about 8000000/23 = 347826 credits per day, which is obviously below 500000.
We do not know why "Recent average credit" does not show as it actually is. (If you know this problem, please let us know.)
For example, the top one "PC4" (now using "syhan" instead) is actually not running anymore.

From the above two, the averaged cores per day is about 347826/540 = 644.
In other words, about 0.073% of the search space should be done per day, and about 0.51% per week.
In reality, the current rate we have now (from the "percentage" page) is about 0.05% per day.
For the difference between 0.073 and 0.05%, we observed that
(1) the first 0.3 billion sudoku grids take more time than those among the whole 5.4 billion, and
(2) the credit reports are not so consistently among different machines
(the reason could be that the machine benchmark test by BOINC are not consistent for our application).

Although some organizations in Taiwan promised to add more computing power to help,
we would appreciate your letting us know, if you know better way to advertise our BOINC project to speed up the project world-wide.
Thank you very much.

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.
As for the faulty statistics, I suppose one could delete some entries (reffering to inactive participants) from the database. It looks like there are stale entries which don't receive updates.
To draw some more attention to the project some activity in team forums might help - especially if the fact is highlighted that this project could be finished within a very finite scope. Being listed in the BOINC client might also increase the likelihood to attract new participants. If my uinderstanding of the problem is correct, it should work reasobly well on GPUs, ATI/AMD cards in my machines weren't utilized.

Lasse

Hi,

as Mankka* wrote in this thread http://sudoku.nctu.edu.tw/forum_thread.php?id=20#69. This project is not credited so good as other project. So if you increase number of credits for WU than you have much more crunchers.

You can also organize some challenge as it is made by Primegrid project.

Some project generate badges for participiants. It can be also interesting for somebody if they can add it to his/her signature :-)

Petr

I think this project is advertised much too little, very few people actually know this project exists. Even sites like Rechenkraft.net, a site that lists pretty much every DC project, doesn't include yours.

As Lasse has already pointed out, I am sure you could get more crunchers by having your project added to the list on the BOINC website as well as the list in the BOINC Manager. Also tell the BOINC website maintainers they should post a news item about your project as they have often done in the past to announce new projects.

The reason why I find this project very interesting is that it's one of the few projects that have a clearly defined amount of work that is tried to get done, and we can easily track the progress we are making. And when all that search space is completed it is guaranteed that we have an answer - in contrast to projects that keep searching for patterns and no one knows if takes 1 year or 10 or 1000 to ever find a match.
Maybe this should be made very clear on the front page, I would even place the progress bar directly on the home page, so that every user immediately sees how far we got.

Apart from that it's always good to regularly post updates and news on the front page, even if it may seem minor. Users actually care if they are being informed about outages and if the website is kept up to date with background information. You won't attract many volunteers by posting a message every four months and waiting quietly until they finish their job.