Make sure you head here to make your potential prize selections! Even if you are not interested in a prize, we would like you to fill it out so we know everyone has had a chance to make their selections. 
 
5/01/15
 
The Mountain Time Zone has held on to win the 2014 Time Zone Challenge! It was a close race but Eastern was not able to catch Mountain's incredible output. Here are the final standings:

• 1st Mountain - Champions of both the BIGADV and GPU crunching divisions, as well as claiming the overall title!
• 2nd Eastern - Champions of the Folding division.
• 3rd Central - Champions of the CPU crunching division.
• 4th Pacific - Nice guys always finish last 

 
Some final numbers:
 
199,281,743 Total folding points and 76,451,630 Total crunching points in the 11 days of competition! Some special recognition to bowlinra of Eastern for topping the folding with 21,275,638 (Nearly 2 million ppd) and bcavnaugh of Mountain for topping crunching with 29,239,152 (over 2.5 million ppd).
 
This contest would not have been possible without the help from many of you, including:

• Punchy (Crunching Stats, General Setup, Ideas, Prize Drawing)
• Drougnor (Folding Stats, Miscellaneous Pimping)
• Viper97 (Swag)
• Everyone who donated prizes for the community.

Everyone who took place in this contest deserve many thanks as well. Without you we would not have put out the production we did and wipe out some work units!
 
I hope you enjoyed this challenge as much as I did. Putting it together was fun as well as a learning experience. I will consider putting together more contests in the future, but it is the summer break upcoming. For now, it is time to get prepared for the BOINC Pentathlon! 
 
4/29/14
 
The final crunching stat collection will be at 12:15 AM Pacific (3:15 AM Eastern) on the 1st of May! Folding stats will be collected shortly after. Eastern and Mountain are locked into a tight race, so it is time to end strong!
 
4/23/14
 
Some have requested to be a part of the crunching divisions. As there appeared to be no objections, this is now being allowed from now through the remainder of the challenge. And, because we are making changes to the crunching files already, we will be allowing late entrants to the crunching divisions during this time period. Please PM me or make a post in this thread if you wish to change or be added as a late entrant. Feel free to get the word out that your team needs help!
 
For the sake of transparency, all changes will be listed in my post here.
 
4/20/14
 
Happy Easter everyone! I hope your rigs are running because we are LIVE! The 2014 Time Zone Challenge has kicked off as of 12 Midnight PDT (3AM EDT) Stats were zeroed out and everything is working well. Enjoy the race and may the best time zone (Pacific)  win!
 
4/19/14
 
Sign ups are now closed! The international placement is as follows:

• BadBertie -> Central
• CHiLL72 -> Mountain
• CleWe -> Mountain
• DutchForce -> Mountain
• Orange_1050 -> Mountain
• Neocasses -> Pacific

If you have any issues with this distribution, please bring it up quickly. There is only so much longer I can make changes to the system.
 
4/17/14
 
We are only 3 days away from the start of the 2014 TZC! Time to do your final checks on your rigs and get ready to run some assignment servers dry!
 
A friendly reminder that sign-ups will close at 12 Noon EDT (9AM PDT) on Saturday, April 19th. Make sure you get signed up if you are interested! Late entrants will need to PM me to be considered. However, once the stats forms are finalized, there will be no more entrants allowed.
 
As with other contests, the start time (on the 20th) will not be made public until after the start has happened. This discourages queuing up completed projects before the start. It also covers up any false starts I may make while getting the stats going. 
 
4/6/14
 
The project lists for crunching are now out! The list can be found one the home page of the official site, near the bottom. Thanks to Punchy's crunching stat work, we are able to include 144 projects for people to choose from! Some of those are inactive, but you have plenty of options nonetheless. There are 9 GPU projects and the remaining are CPU. The discussion of the project choices can be found here. Feel free to add to the discussion if you feel something is out of place.
 
A special note about PrimeGrid. We are going to have an overlap with the PrimeGrid challenge from the 20th to the 23rd. We encourage those interested to take place, as you will be credited in both challenges. The PrimeGrid challenge will be CPU-only, but the points will still report to the GPU category for the TZC, as Prime Grid has been placed in the GPU division.
 
4/3/14 
 
The prize donation form has now been posted! --> Prize Donation Form <--
 
I have added an additional method known as the "Pool Prize" where people can donate money via PayPal or gift cards from Amazon and Newegg. These will be pooled together to yield a much larger and more impressive prize. Please read the prize page for more details, and let me know about any questions or concerns.
 
Additionally, the sign-up form has been updated to include a request for the BOINC CPID. If you need to look it up, I personally used the user search here. Make sure it is the correct you. Other people can have your user name as well. This would be very helpful for collections of stats. Those who have already signed up can either PM Punchy or I with that information. We can also look this up ourselves, but this would save us a lot of time.
 
4/2/14
 
Sign-ups are open! --> Sign-up form <--  
 
Sign-ups end sometime on April 19th, so please do not wait until the last minute. We need to get everyone in the system and ready for stats. Please have folded or crunched at least one work unit before we start, so we can find you for stats.
 
4/2/14
 
I am happy to announce the first folding contest of 2014, the new Time Zone Challenge! This is also the first folding contest in over a year, so it is very exciting to bring this together. The rules are a little bit different than the Time Zone Challenges of before, but I think these changes will keep things fun. The rules can be found on the site linked above, but below are some key points of the new challenge.

• Crunching is now included in the challenge! This was made possible by the creation of divisions.
• There are 4 divisions, Standard Folding, bigadv Folding, CPU Crunching and GPU Crunching. You may participate in BOTH Crunching divisions as well as one of the Folding divisions. It was created this way so that no one DC method could dominate more than 25% of the contest.
• Each division is given a score based on their rank. The scores are added up for each team to determine their overall placing.
• The TZC is not a race to a point total this year. Because this is the first time to include crunching, it is not certain what a fair spread of points is. Therefore, the winner is determined by the team with the most division points at the end of the contest.
• If we get enough international entrants, they may be added as a 5th team, rather than balanced to other teams.

 
There are a few other things of note, especially crunching based. Folding stats, provided by drougnor, will be updated hourly. Crunching stats will be much less regular, and perhaps even input manually for some projects. We will do our best to keep them up to date.
 
A list of eligible crunching projects will be posted sometime around April 14th. During sign up, we are asking crunchers to indicate which projects they are working on/interested in so we can include them in our points gathering. We should be able to include most, if not all, of your requested projects. Crunching projects will also be separated by GPU and CPU based. Basically, any project that receives a substantial points boost from utilizing the GPU should be considered a GPU project.
 
This is my first contest I have set up, so I apologize if I have missed some information. If you have any questions or comments, please post or PM me. I will try to respond as quickly as possible. I will be updating the site and this thread regularly with new information.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

I know this is beyond "Blue Ribbonish" behavior, but at least had to pop-in a recognition request for Sajinoir and Drougnor for all the great work they are doing with this contest setup.  
 
Very well done sirs and what an excellent way to bring the team together too. 

bcavnaugh
Question on
"BigAdv Folding: All folders who fold on bigadv servers will need to choose this division.
This allows bigadv to not dominate the entire contest.
Bigadv folders may still use GPU/CPU folding to supplement their stats."
 
With so little Core 17 available to run on Windows and Linux can only run Core 17 should we move all our Windows GPU Rigs over to Linux/Ubuntu 12.04 LTS?
This would take out the Core 15 issue we now seem to have.
Thanks

 
In terms of the challenge, you can do whatever you would like. Folding on Linux makes no difference to the division you are in. If you are folding bigadv work units on your cpu, that is the only time you will have to change to another division. Hopefully there will be some more core 17 out and about by the time the challenge starts, but it may not. If you intend to only crunch until core 17s come back, I would still recommend signing up under a folding division as well. This will allow you to come back to folding if core 17s start coming out in the middle of the contest.
 

I know this is beyond "Blue Ribbonish" behavior, but at least had to pop-in a recognition request for Sajinoir and Drougnor for all the great work they are doing with this contest setup.

 
Sajinoir gets all the credit and I get nothing. 

bcavnaugh
I see, I will then sign up my BA under "BigAdv Folding" and then all the rest under:

• CPU Crunching: Choose this division if you wish to crunch projects that do not utilize GPUs.
• GPU Crunching: Choose this division if you wish to crunch projects that do utilize GPUs.

Thanks, this is my 1st Time Zone Challenge.

This TZC is a bit different than before, so anyone might be confused by the rules right now. In your case, you would simply choose all 3 options in the sign up, then indicate you are a bigadv folder as well. This will allow you to put your production towards anything you would like. Your points will be distributed among the divisions automatically, depending on which project you have been working on.

Oh yeah!  Great idea, really looking forward to this one.

sajinor
You did sign up correctly on the form. Is no one able to see the "Contestant List" page?
 

bcavnaugh
 
PS
Is there a PayPal Account to help with this?

There will be a gift prize donation form put up in the next day or so. On that form will be an option for "pool prizes" so if someone wants to donate cash or gift cards, they can go together to yield a higher value prize.

Great, keep us posted.

Just a quick question for my edification.... is the system weighted?  Folding and Crunching have different point awards...  Folding generally has a bonus for completion times while Crunching is just pretty much this is what you get.
 
I'm sure things will work out... and frankly I'm just asking so I know what I won't complain about 'cause ya done tolt me already! 

Viper97
Just a quick question for my edification.... is the system weighted?  Folding and Crunching have different point awards...  Folding generally has a bonus for completion times while Crunching is just pretty much this is what you get.
 
I'm sure things will work out... and frankly I'm just asking so I know what I won't complain about 'cause ya done tolt me already! 

If you go back to my original proposal for this idea http://forums.evga.com/FindPost/2141763 or check the rules, you'll see that you get points for your team's placing in each division, then those points are added up to crown the victor.  Those points are unrelated to folding or crunching scores.  So, it's a form of weighting, but not dependent on any project's scoring system.

Edified...

Opolis
Also, this event overlaps with the PrimeGrid event on 4/20-4/23.  Maybe we should make that one of the projects in the TZC.

PrimeGrid will be included in the TZC, so people will be able to "double dip" for those 3 days. I was trying to work around as many contests as possible, but still ended up on top of one.

Yep, I completely mistook it in the other thread and thought the divisions were based on projects, not on users. However, if we end up with 2 pre-approved lists, even if some projects utilize both CPU and GPU, it should create a relatively balanced contest, as teams will need some focus on both divisions. In my mind, it was easier to pull stats for the method of having 2 lists to look at, rather than each individual's claimed project(s). It is early enough I can modify the sign up if we need to change something.

Just signed up, looking forward to this. 

Didn't see the CPID field....  if there is a way to update it, 0b8da854c54b1a761969e962c0afd72c is me....

In! 
 

 

I did create some badges for the contest back when we thought it was gonna happen back in late 2013.  This was the last design that I made for the TZC that we didn't have in 2013 and my plan was to have each Team's Time Zone name inserted.

 
But this new flavor of the TZC (that brings both Folders and Crunchers together for the first time) may warrant something new.  I'm wrapping up our taxes right now, but might have some time to work on some ideas after that.  As always, ideas from the group are welcome!  I'd be happy to help with that SWAG design and think it would great to have something special for the contest.
 
I must warn you though...Punchy has this thing about "committing an act of graffiti" on graphics.  We are taking a collection to get him into "graffiti counseling", but are pretty well resolved that it may not take.
 
Speaking of Punchy, I was reminded today that we all owe him a Big Team "Thank-You" for having spawned the idea of the Divisions that brought us to this combined Folding/Crunching version of TZC!  Bravo and we need a lot more of that to remind us that we really are one team!