CONTENTS:

* Personal Milestones
* May UoTD
* A Look into the Past
* SETI.USA MiniCity
* Project of the Month
* BOINC Standings
* Quote of the Month
* Request for Guest Articles
* May Trivia Winners
* Trivia Standings
* GPUs, Competition for Multi Cores
 

  -Orion

SETI.USA would like to thank ALL of it's dedicated members and offer CONGRATULATIONS to all those who achieved significant personal SETI and BOINC milestones in May/June. As you all know, we are growing exponentially. We now have:

15 members with 10,000,000+ SETI
177 members with 1,000,000+
357 members with 500,000+
1,309 members with 100,000+

View SETI Milestones

View BOINC Milestones

   -SargeD

May was another good month for the team with a total of 51 UoTDs. Our best projects for the month were Pirates and uFluids with 5 UoTDs each.  Our best days were the 3rd with 5 UoTDs, the 25th with 4, and the 10th, 21st, 26th, 27th and 31st with 3 UoTDs each day.  We have passed  BOINC@Heidelberg and moved into the #6 spot for total UoTDs.  It is going to be a long haul to reach #5 since the UK BOINC Team is 346 ahead of us.  So make sure you have a profile on all of the projects you are registered on since we need all the UoTDs we can get

Congratulations to our top members, trigggl with 5 and theflux with 4. They are followed by Steve Martin @ SETI.USA,  Persch Patrick J., medictom and Tank_Master with 3 each for the month.  Honorable mention to several others who had 2 each.

NOTE: If you have not done so, please build a user profile at each of the projects you crunch or are registered at. Also as time permits vote for the profile of some of our members.

View UoTDs  

A look into the Past     -Orion and SargeD

While looking back through some old information, team member Orion discovered some forum posting stats from May 2006.  We thought it would be interesting to compare those stats to the same stats for this year.  So below is a  table listing the stats from 3 years ago and the ones from today. Hopefully we can find other stats from the past to show you in future issues of our newsletter.

SETI.USA MiniCity -SargeD

UPDATE:  Our population growth rate for May was once again very erratic. We had days where our growth was close to 3000, but these were offset by days where we had between 800 and 1400.  We have not only lost our #10 spot but have dropped down to #12.  The early stats for June show that we are still somewhat erratic, but we are having more days in the 2500-3000 range than we did in previous months, so there is a chance that we can climb back up again.  All we have to do is keep pushing and be sure to click the population link (only the population link) every day.  Get the word out to all of your friends/family and ask them to click as well.  Also remember that if you have access to more than one IP address, then be sure to click on the other IPs as well.  I know we can climb back up and maybe even move higher than #10.  So let's do it!!

For those of you who may have never visited our MiniCity, it is an online simulated city.  It's growth is based on the number of unique IPs that visit each day.  These visits control the growth of several factors such as population, industry, transportation, security, environment and business. 

We would like to encourage those members who have not participated in this to consider helping us push on up to be the #1 largest minicity in the USA.  Here are the links that you need to help us with this project:

To check what is needed visit this link: http://seti.usa.myminicity.com/xml
Increase population: http://seti.usa.myminicity.com
Increase industry: http://seti.usa.myminicity.com/ind
Improve the transport network: http://seti.usa.myminicity.com/tra
Increase security: http://seti.usa.myminicity.com/sec
Improve environment: http://seti.usa.myminicity.com/env
Increase business: http://seti.usa.myminicity.com/com

If everybody clicks every day we will move on up to #1!  Discussions regarding our MiniCity are located here: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=9539

Project of the Month: -DrBob

SETI.USA encourages its members to participate in the project of their choice. Now that we have accomplished the team's original goal of being #1 in SETI@home, credit in ALL BOINC projects is valuable to the team's future success.

Some members have asked for direction as to which projects they should allocate their resources to. Therefore we have decided to designate a "Team Project of the Month".

Enigma has been chosen for the Team Project of the Month for July.

Our team is currently ranked 8th in total credit and 7th for daily output on the project.

Enigma
Project URL: http://www.enigmaathome.net/
Create an Account: http://www.enigmaathome.net/create_account_form.php
Join Our Team: http://www.enigmaathome.net/team_display.php?teamid=38

In the event of a temporary shortage of work on Enigma we are designating a secondary project for the month of July.

Virtual Prairie

Our team is currently ranked 4th in total credit and 3rd for daily output on the project.

Virtual Prairie
Project URL: http://vcsc.cs.uh.edu/virtual-prairie/
Create an Account: http://vcsc.cs.uh.edu/virtual-prairie/create_account_form.php
Join Our Team: http://vcsc.cs.uh.edu/virtual-prairie/team_display.php?teamid=18

   -DrBob

Quote of the Month:

Ah but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.            

-Bob Dylan (1941- )

Guest Articles

Do you have or would you like to write an article for our newsletter? We are always looking for new material of interest to our members. If you have something you would like to submit, go here and post it.

GPUs, Competition for Multi-Core -SargeD

A serious competitor for the multi-core CPU is represented by graphical processing units (GPUs), which are graphic cards used for scientific computing. There are four basic things about GPUs. They are fast and will get a lot faster. They are cheap, measured on a performance-per-dollar basis. They use less power than CPUs when compared on a performance-per-watt basis. But the fourth thing is their limitations.

GPUs are only good for tasks that perform some type of number crunching. The GPU was designed specifically to process graphics, and that means processing streams of data. Graphics chips may simply be seen as massive Multi-Cores, where in high end versions up to 800 (Shader-) units are running in parallel, within a GPU cluster there could be more than 3000.

The large potential of the GPU can be shown by the following numbers. The fastest graphics chips from AMD and Nvidia are already in the Teraflops range whereas normal Multi-Core chips are slowly touching this border.

The real problem with GPUs is that they may not be programmed as it is for usual x86-; Sparc- or Power-CPUs. That’s the reason that Nvidia GPUs offer the support of the CUDA (compute unified device architecture) library that provides a set of user-level subroutines and allows the GPU to be programmed with standard C or Fortran without the need to use a graphics specific API.

Nevertheless with the Supercomputer »Tsubame« from the institute of Technology in Tokyo we have the first system in the TOP500 list that is running »Tesla«-Graphics-Chip from Nvidia. The system-cluster consists of 170 Tesla-S1070-systems resulting in 170 Teraflops –theoretically. In practice the system reaches 77,48 Teraflops, which means number 29 in the ranking of the TOP500 list (November 2008).

For the nearest future scenario of HPC systems we expect that the hardware architecture will be a combination of specialized CPU and GPU type cores.

But now the most challenging problem for HPC is the energy consumption. In the future all (Chip manufacturer, data center manager) have to tackle the problems of energy-efficiency and energy consumption.

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