Thank you, Lawrence.

We cannot remember whether we posted this before, but Alan contributed to last year’s Equinox Blueprint: Energy 2030. Check it out!
http://wgsi.org/content/equinox-blueprint-energy-2030

Here's a philosophical question for the day:

If a windows machine blue screens, but everyone is too busy debating year / day / hours to notice it, does a mac person still smirk about it?

Aaron

I regret that I have irritated anyone involved at CEP2 or any other of the WCG projects. I only brought this issue here because CEP2 put the 2 million figure on its Facebook page.

But, numbers are important. For me, the most significant number is FLOPS.

All of BOINC, with 293,845 active users on 473,716 hosts is doing 5.9 PetaFLOPS (All figures from BOINCStats) in an avergae 24 hour period.

WCG with 92,007 active users on 236,186 hosts is doing .357 PetaFLOPS.

SETI@home has 159,210 users on 236,471 hosts, a figure not different from WCG's total active hosts. But SETI@home is doing .558 PetaFLOPS.

SETI@home is one project, albeit doing more than one form of research. We have eleven active projects, all of which are on problems much closer to home than SETI (I crunch SETI@home both CPU and GPU on three machines, along with WCG, all projects, on four machines. I am also a financial supporter in a very small way of SETI@home. SETI@home is the birthplace of BOINC, so if nothing else, it is a debt of gratitude being repaid.)

Can you imagine what we would be doing if the figure of 2 million was at all relevant?

WCG has become very very good with social media, using both Facebook and Twitter. I was after them for a long time to get this going. I am sure that I had plenty of company, as more and more people recognize the power and potential of social media.

Their first attempts were not good. In fact, they were kicked off of Facebook, some sort of an alleged spamming infraction.

But, now they are very good at it. We get our weekly and monthly figures appearing right on our Twitter pages and these entries come from the mother ship. WCG also has Facebook entries showing the numbers of new crunchers every month. We can "share" them with our Facebook "friends" and all of our Twitter followers see them.

So, WCG is actively trying to build their program and attract new crunchers. To them, the figure of 2 million looks useful. To me, it takes the edge off the necessity of a new user to attach. The figure of 95,000 active crunchers is much smaller, revealing a much greater need.

We all should be doing whatever we can to encourage active participation of new users. I talk to people at work, family, Lord knows, anyone that I can collar. I made up business cards with the WCG and BOINC URLS and graphic icons. I handed out 20 or so at my grandson's Bar Mitzvah. My wife says I have no shame.

Because BOINC sees WCG as one project, on all of my machines WCG has a 200 share. I have no other CPU project anywhere near the WCG credit total. The only projects that I run which have more credits than WCG are projects with GPU crunching.

So, sorry if I offended anyone, sorry if my reality or focus is different than someone else's. The folks running CEP2 know where my heart is.

Hi mitrichr,
don't worry - your comments are always welcome and this was a fair discussion. No harm, no foul ;).
Best wishes
Your Harvard CEP team
P.S. We like your Bar Mitzvah advertisement initiative - you may not want to extend this to funerals, though.