>From: Jukka Tapani Santala <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: Nathan Russell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>CC: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: Re: Mersenne: searching the biggies
>Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2000 01:19:56 +0200 (EET)
>
>On Fri, 3 Mar 2000, Nathan Russell wrote:
> > >>Two of their other projects lost GIMPS-years of work each because of
> > >>stupid bugs and I got fed up and left.
> > >Uh... we had a bug too. Ironically, it was announced on April Fools
>Day
> > >last year. That caused quite a stir. We lost roughly a GIMPS month of
> > >work.
> > I am aware that there was a bug in V 17. There will always be bugs.
>The
> > bugs (plural) that occured in my former project were merely the final
>reason
> > that I decided to leave.
>
>Incidentally, what bothers me about the "other project" is not that they
>had bugs, but more that the explanations of the bugs don't seem to check
>up(*), to such a degree as they bother to even state what the issues
>were. In fact they had a third, similiar incident involving the suspected
>delay in announcing the finishing of one competition long back, altough I
>don't remember/know enough details to comment other than that to note they
>do certainly seem to have a history of this sort of stuff cropping
>up. Incidentally, could you imagine them having a "Make noise if correct
>solution found?" option in their clients... ;)
Not in, um, about as long as it would take to test MM(127)!
>
>(*) For the most recent problem... As far as I can tell, when switching
>between systems - even between OS'es on the same computer - the involved
>client versions would happily restart the current work unit losing all
>work so far. The announcement about the bug claimed it would only occur in
>such a situation, which thus should not happen.
>
>To further confuse issues, the announcement claims that they have to
>abandon all work so far because the faulty packets are undetectable, and
>that the problem generating the faulty packets has been fixed, but in
>practically same breath continues that servers have been made to reject
>the faulty packets... Which should be both non-existent and impossible to
>spot?
That is quite an interesting question.
>
>And exactly how does incorrect count of possible solutions in a
>pre-defined block invalidate the results, anyway? I think OGR could be one
>of the most useful applications distributed computing has been applied to
>so far, but unfortunately I can't feel comfortable my CPU-ticks go towards
>what I want and I am getting full disclosure with who are running it now.
It seems to me that they must have had an issue with some aspect of the
client that they are unwilling to publically discuss. Perhaps the issue
that occured couldn't be described without giving away vital info about
their verification code. Even if that were the case, however, one would
think that they would merely say so, or even a simple "We found a bug, wait
for a new version to come out" rather than lying to everyone.
>
>
>Incidentally, have you seen JETI@home? Unfortunately I don't remewmber the
>URL right now, but that's worth checking out, too, at least if you don't
>take everything related to distributed computing too seriously ;)
I thought it was YETI@home
>
>Incidentally#2, has anybody looked into the application of distributed
>computing into genetics? With the increased availability of genetic
>information online, on the WWW, such applications don't seem too
>far-fetched.
Sounds like a neat field...
>
>Anyway, sorry to sound out, but I am feeling rather incensed by the way I
>perceive many distributed computing operations to disrespect/waste their
>contributors and the resources. Words seem to fail me in correctly
>describing it just now, but I hope you can see what I mean. I think the
>least Distributed Computing outfits "owe" to their contributors is a clean
>accounting of what their CPU-time has went towards.
I happen to know that SETI duplicates their work two or three times, for
example
Nathan
>
> -Donwulff
>
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