sajinor has taken on the huge task of running a Time Zone Challenge contest for our DC teams.  I've noticed from a few comments that people in the crunching subsection haven't noticed the announcement.  I think part of this has to do with the elimination of the contest subsection.
 
Anyway, since this contest will include both folding and crunching divisions, I wanted to give it a little more visibility to all of our dedicated crunchers by making a short post in the crunching section.  Feel free to join in and support your local time zone!

in....

Yup, lots of contests and that's a good thing. It gets people interested.
 
Only one minor issue for me is all these contests is making it hard to plan the next Point Pillaging run. I don't want to have people jumping from one contest/event to another and not have time to run the projects that are personally important to them.
 
I am waiting to see what the projects are for the TZC and the Boinc Pentathlon. I am hoping one of them has SIMAP which is the project I was looking at for the next Point Pillaging event. If SIMAP is on the list maybe we can piggyback Point Pillaging with the other contests. Kind of like what TZC is doing with the Prime Grid Shakespeare event.

sajinor
We can probably include SIMAP in the TZC if it would help. We will trying to be building a pretty big list of accepted projects, as we want people to crunch what they want. Still, I will need to wait until I see what the stats system Punchy is working on to see what all we can start including.
 
Is the "Remaining" under "Project Status" seen here indicating they are only sending out work for another 15 days? Or is that something else?

That's just a rough guess of how much work is on hand for donors to crunch before the servers run out. If you watch those numbers it fluctuates as work is done and new work is added to the server. On a good project it will fluctuate others on the other hand seem to be running out and not putting any, or very little, new work up. Mind Modeling, Malaria Control, GPU Grid, Ibercivis(no medical tasks to run, just a Prime number finder) and some others have run out of work recently forcing me to jump projects.
 
Mind Modeling is still out of work after running out several days ago. I think they are doing a big rework of their project and website so hopefully they will be back up and running soon.
 
Edit: I just took a quick look around the forums for SIMAP and that number might just be accurate in stating there is just enough work for 15 days at current production levels. All I know for sure is I am going to run SIMAP until there isn't any more work then move to another project. This seems to be the bane of projects running Bio/Medical research, running out of work for donors to crunch.

In other words business as normal running all Boinc projects only our production is going to be tracked during the event?

Cool, good work. I wish I could help out with it but I don't have the talent for that kind of stuff.

This one works for me =]

yodap
Should we use this thread to talk about projects for the TZC, or start a new one?

Anywhere is fine. I have been watching all of the threads to put together the remaining info we need. I have been building a list of projects, but I won't be able to say for sure until we know what we can do for stats. 

That's great! Are we going to be able to pull stats for all of the projects, or are we looking at whittling the list down?
 
PrimeGrid does make itself a bit tricky. If put in the GPU division, the time during the PrimeGrid Challenge will be much less significant, while if we put it in the CPU division, it could end up dominating the division for those that run GPU as well. Of course, I think most crunchers intending to take place in the PrimeGrid Challenge will do so regardless of the division we put it in. They are cool that way. 
 
No list will be perfect and we will have to do the best we can. It will be fun either way, and we can always work towards improving it next year.

sajinor
That's great! Are we going to be able to pull stats for all of the projects, or are we looking at whittling the list down?

We can track them all, thanks to netsoft-online.com's stats aggregation.  We are limited to their list, which is not quite as extensive as free-dc or boincstats, but I think it covers most of the major projects.
 

sajinorPrimeGrid does make itself a bit tricky. If put in the GPU division, the time during the PrimeGrid Challenge will be much less significant, while if we put it in the CPU division, it could end up dominating the division for those that run GPU as well. Of course, I think most crunchers intending to take place in the PrimeGrid Challenge will do so regardless of the division we put it in. They are cool that way. 

Exactly what I was thinking as well.
 
 

Khalifrio
I think the simple solution would be to make projects that offer GPU and CPU work count as GPU only.

Agreed, and if I have missed any, let me know.  I tried to pull from a few sources to make sure I covered them all.

KhalifrioThere is no way to separate out where the points come from, GPU or CPU.

Well, there is a way: if people are honest when they fill out the contest form, and specify only CPU or only GPU, then we "know".  But that adds a little complexity and might unbalance things, so it's probably best to put the points from a particular project in the same bucket regardless of the user.

KhalifrioThe thing I have noticed is that GPU points are almost always higher making the CPU portion a drop in the bucket, plus the CPU tasks tend to have a longer run time. So there won't be any point in trying to cheat by running both CPU and GPU on one project. Its rare that I will run both CPU and GPU on one project simply because the CPU tasks take longer to run and points are less compared to time to run each task.

This was exactly the reasoning that led me to propose the division of CPU and GPU in the first place, but since I rarely even have a GPU plugged in, it's nice to hear it from someone that uses both technologies.

I have a first pass done on the stats and if you were an early entrant for the TZC I'd appreciate it if you look through this output and see if it's catching the numbers you would expect for the last 24 hours or so.  This isn't official or anything - the contest hasn't started yet, but I want to get some testing done beforehand.  It won't match up exactly to any other stats site because I didn't start/stop at midnight, but see if you are getting credited with points for what you are running.  From the warning messages (lines starting with a "*") it looks like both Khali and UncleGregy just started running Collatz in the last day or so - is that right?
 

-----------------------------------
sajinor, team Pacific
project Einstein@Home points delta 19993

-----------------------------------
planetclown, team Eastern
project MilkyWay@home points delta 294

-----------------------------------
bcavnaugh, team Mountain
project PrimeGrid points delta 45023
project malariacontrol.net points delta 6574
project POEM@HOME points delta 896
project MilkyWay@home points delta 207
project IBERCIVIS points delta 3546
project GPUGRID points delta 104850
project Collatz Conjecture points delta 4589750

-----------------------------------
Opolis, team Pacific
project SIMAP points delta 17
project Asteroids@home points delta 960
project theSkyNet POGS points delta 336

-----------------------------------
gregnrose, team Central
project World Community Grid points delta 2876

-----------------------------------
RHMash, team Pacific
project WUProp@Home points delta 70

-----------------------------------
Khali, team Eastern
project World Community Grid points delta 66
project SIMAP points delta 6684
project IBERCIVIS points delta 81
project WUProp@Home points delta 140
project GPUGRID points delta 142800
*base points not found for user Khali project Collatz Conjecture, assuming 0
project Collatz Conjecture points delta 153305

-----------------------------------
UncleGregy, team Central
project Enigma@Home points delta 11733
project yoyo@home points delta 132
*base points not found for user UncleGregy project Collatz Conjecture, assuming
0
project Collatz Conjecture points delta 455370
project Asteroids@home points delta 480

-----------------------------------
Afterburners, team Pacific
project MilkyWay@home points delta 14695
project GPUGRID points delta 266250

-----------------------------------
Viper97, team Pacific

-----------------------------------
tanner2, team Central
project World Community Grid points delta 14734

-----------------------------------
LearjetMinako, team Central
project World Community Grid points delta 664

-----------------------------------
Steak House, team Eastern

-----------------------------------
yodap, team Eastern
project World Community Grid points delta 139
project MilkyWay@home points delta 214
project Collatz Conjecture points delta 1252566
project Constellation points delta 252
project Asteroids@home points delta 480

========== Final Tallies =============
division Central-CPU, score 30619
division Eastern-CPU, score 7842
division Mountain-CPU, score 10120
division Pacific-CPU, score 1383
division Central-GPU, score 455370
division Eastern-GPU, score 1549179
division Mountain-GPU, score 4740726
division Pacific-GPU, score 300938

 
 

Punchy - your stats look accurate for me.  Even though I switched off MilkyWay almost a week ago, task verifications are still trickling in.

Well at lest for GPU Collatz Conjecture Project has me hook.
Our Team Crunching@EVGA even hit their Top 10 Today as well as myself, 1st Top 10 for a single Project.
 
Still looking for a Good CPU Project.
Malaria Control Project Project Our Team Crunching@EVGA even hit their Top 10 Today as well.
 
Moving all CPU But not my 2 PrimGrid Rigs over to Docking@Home Project today to see what points per day.

I came to crunching to get away from the "points race".  I pick my projects primarily based on whether they work on causes I am interested in, and secondarily on supporting team efforts.  For now I am sticking with Malaria Control because I had to drop out of the points pillaging early due to heat, and in honor of Barbarossa/Urlauber, our top producer in Malaria Control.  It was a favorite of his because malaria was still an issue in one of his favorite vacation spots.  It must be pure coincidence that he came back just as I was thinking about him.

It is a points race, but hopefully it is an incentive for people to put more production into the projects they are already interested in. And there is no harm in people putting more production into the higher point yielding projects. It is all work that needs to be done, and hopefully the TZC will make more of it get done.