Genome@home
 

Many of you are familiar with the Genome@home project down at Stanford. For those of you who aren't, the project is a distributed-computing application dedicated to processing all the information found by the Human Genome Project. What this means is that you go to the Genome@home web site (genomeathome.stanford.edu) and download a small program called a client. This client downloads a piece of data from the Stanford servers and, while your computer is idle, processes it. It then sends the processed info back to Stanford, and downloads a new bit. All in all, with the thousands of computers on the net, and all the time each of them spends idle, an incredible amount of processing power is available.

Another thing about this project is that it's team-based. When you sign up, you give them a team id, and any processing you do adds a certain amount of points to that team's total. Well, I took the liberty of starting TeamCellar (id 1177597296), in hopes of getting a few of you who aren't involved in the project yet involved. Not to mention that I jsut think it'd be damn cool for us to pull together and get something done, even if pulling together means just sitting idle. Hell, we may find the Parkinson's gene or soemthing similar. Again, the site is genomeathome.stanford.edu, the team is TeamCellar, the team id # is 1177597296. Get to processing, and maybe some day the Cellar will be up in lights.

Steve

That's so awesome!

And they have a Linux version, which means that in about 15 minutes there'll be 3-4 boxes dedicated to just this work. Excellent!

oops
 

I downloaded the software but missed the place to hook up with TeamCellar. Anyway to do it after the fact?

duh
 

turns out its obvious, the first time you run it... great idea steve

If you see "anton" listed in the team stats, that would be me. And we made the teams list overnight. In fact we jumped into 655th place out of 724.

I have two WinME boxes and three Linux boxes running it.

I'm still not found on the user list...probably b/c I've "created" so little so far. Considering I'm running this show on Win95 and a 56K.

Tony, maybe you can help me with this. When I tried to shut it down last night (b/c I'm running a modem), it didn't want to "quit." It won't let you put a "quit" command in, so I shut it down via CTRL-ALT-Delete. But when I tried to shut my computer down, the computer froze. Any insight? (It did this twice last night.)

It looks like you have to complete a gene or a work cycle to get your bit entered as a "work unit". Or maybe your system has to report it what it's done so far, I dunno.

As far as making it stop, I don't know! I do know they have an "offline" processing state...

Well, it DID resume where it left off last night. At this rate, it will take me forever to complete one unit. But at least I'm doing my part. :-)

*sitting at 2 of 30 right now*

Tony, I assume you're able to run this program constantly, right?

If you are, we'll fly up in no time...we're already up to #536.

Yeah, it runs here non-stop! If the client is secure and stable I might bring it up on a sixth machine, but I'll have to get clearance from the customer first. They're a non-profit and have a pretty idle machine, so there shouldn't be any trouble.

We're still climbing 524 and counting! I get the idea Tony is running a little bit more horse power than the rest of us hangers on. My last one hasn't been listed yet but my lap top was crunching all last night and until suppertime tonight. It slows things down a bit but what the hay, its way too cool. GO TEAMCELLAR!

logo
 

Hey! We need a logo... did anyone see the dutch power cows'... clever.

Whoa!
 

I didn't know that this thing ran w/o my modem on! Outstanding! I can leave it on almost all the time now...

Yeah, that's the only minor complaint I have about it...it's bogging my system a bit. (Of course, it doesn't help that I'm updating my website and uploading pics and what not.) It's worth it though...

Well my athlon 1.2 is hard at work on it, and will be 24/7.
I'm grounded so i'm going to play around with a few logos, ill attach them to a message later.

Pretty arkane program compared to seti@home ain't it..

Up to 470 now...

On my start menu under gah, it gives an option of "Run off network." Any idea what that might be?

Not very helpful, really... we don't know whether that means "run while connected to the network" or "run even through you're OFF the network".

Damn, were doing well, 281 and rising like a rocket, mostly thanks to Tonys cluster.
Look @ the number of people it the top group!
I may be getting a dual Athlon box soon (long story) which might help a *bit*
=)

I'm not sure what the hell is up, but my GAH won't do any more sequences--it keeps shutting down. I may re-upload it over the weekend.

Mine seems to have died while i was at school, now idea why....
Hmm, seems it 'generated an error' as Win2k so verbosely puts it...buggarit

Re: logo
 

By golly, Griff, you're right!

I cobbled together the following: one with plain, and one with "Philly Flavor".

So, what does the Cellar community think? A preference for either? Ditch 'em both?

Just to make things interesting, I'll leave it to you folks to come up with the "witty slogan" at the bottom.

Discuss among yourselves...

Ha HA, Sweeeeeet!

TeamCellar building a better idiot.

I like the one on the right, personally...it just looks more compact

"TeamCellar: If you put infinite BBSers in a room with infinite typewriters....."

Actually, that sounds like it could be one hell of a signature, too

Griff: The parable says "If you build a better idiots, Marketing will beat a path to your door."

That's just totally awesome!

Matter o' fact, I like it better than the original dumb-as-balls logo I came up with, which is what you see there at the top o' the page... do you have any interest in building one to that size? or even slightly shorter and/or slightly longer?

G@H under Linux?
 

Am I the only one having problems? Has anybody out there managed to get this pig to run on a Linux box? If so, what flavor are you using (distro, kernel, etc etc)?

I untarred it on an old PII-233 running Red Hat 6.2 and.... well, the results were unpleasant.

I know, I know... Red Hat is damaging to my 3l33t h4x0r creds. I should be using SuSE or Slackware, but I'm old and lazy and juggling all those tarballs just isn't as much fun as it used to be.

Any success stories out there?

My Linux copies are running on RH 7.0 boxes and one 6.1 box. I like RH as a company and want to support them. I even go out and buy each new version in stores, to do a little bit to keep shrink-wrapped OSes in CompUSA and stuff.

There are some complaints of crashes on the G@H forums. They say the client software has a bug that causes it to fail with certain proteins. Once you get one of those proteins, there is no recourse, other than to delete it and get a new one to work on. To do that, try deleting the files input.inp and input.pdb before running it.

You mean it's not my badly-configured box?!
 

#include < humor.h >
int main();
int main()
{
cout <<"Thank you, Obi-Wan! \n";
return 0;
}

Is it me, or would main be better as a void than an int there?

It comes iwht a 'clear bad work and restart' program under windows, i had that problem and it worked for me.

Being the sneaky bastad i am i'm starting to install and set G@H up under my name on comptuer i build for other poeple so that should help.

Ill try it on my slack box tonite after install version 8.

Well, I'm doing something similar. We just got a quad xenon box here at my office and, as part of testing it, I am running 4 sessions of ghclient.x on it. They're predictably using 99.6% of all four CPUs and blasting through quite a bit of the G@H data. I'll probably leave it run for a few days and then my throughput will probably drop suddenly. :)

Hey, alph, are you the one to put the logo in at G@H? We should oughta do that, because we're now at 199! Lisa's giving it a serious boost.

What about including the URL in the logo? I always think of promoting it...

done!
 

We are linked and logoed. Downwards of 40 trillion people who are patient enough to let the html teams list load and bored enough to see number 199 can now visit The Cellar. And there was much rejoicing.

And lo, Steve's post started a third page in the thread which he began on the idea which was entirely his. And there was much rejoicing.

And winter came. It was cold and there was little food, and they were forced to eat Sir Robin's Minstrels. And there was much rejoicing.

Thanks man. But now we're at 198...!

The other thing with getting another link is that it improves the Cellar's standing with Google. One of Google's main criteria for higher listing is how many other sites link to you.

I *thought* someone wasflying up the team stats, i guess a quad xeon woudl do that =)
Whats the use for that box? I assume some kind of chunky server.

Well, that's the plan, but it's not needed for that for a short while. It was given to us as agreed upon payment for services rendered from a client/company whose opinion of what they owed us disagreed with our opinion... The box was a good compromise. :)

god that reminds me of the 'webdesign' firm consiting of two people in their spare room i did some work for about a year ago, they hadne't got the $ so they gave me a powerdrill...i didn't know whether to laugh or cry...

i'm wondering what kind of firm has a quad xeon server lieing around but is too stingy/small jsut pay you...I mena its not exactly your average spare workstation.

Oh, I wouldn't say that they were "stingy" or small. There was a disagreement as to whether the work was part of "contracted work" or something that we'd agreed to work on in a "partnership" sort of arrangement. We thought it was the former and they thought it was the latter.

When we looked back over the documents, we both acknowledged that it was a bit vague where this particular work fell. So, we decided to accept the machine in lieu of payment and, this way, both sides are happy.

The machine in question, BTW is a quad 550MHz Xenon with 1GB of ram and 4 - 9G SCSI drives in a RAID-5 configuration. Pretty nice, though I wish the Xenons were clocked a bit faster.

The reason that they had one sitting around is that they are (well, were) a hardware manufacturer and 550's are pretty slow compared to what they actually USE these days. :)

So how many copies of the client are you running?

I was running 4 -- 1 per processor. Since each uses 100% of the processor, I figured it would maximize my throughput. Unfortunately, someone rebooted the system yesterday. I will restart the processes when I go in to work later this AM.

Anyone running this behind a proxy?
The school i do a course thingy at's comptuer are stupid enough to let you install stuff - i wanna get it running under my name on the whole lab, but i can't get it though the proxy. I said yes to firewall, set the prot to 80 and put inthe name of the proxy but it cna't get though, any ideas out there? 25 PIII-800s would probably help the great cause.

It's very simple... don't install the client on any computer you don't own. At best, it's rude. At worst, it's theft. Eventually, the BOFH will discover that someone is using up 100% of the CPU time on all the computers in the lab. And then he will be angry.

Of course, he should do a better job of locking down his network, shouldn't he? The BOFH who's too stupid to prevent his lusers from installing unwanted software isn't really worthy of the title; he deserves whatever he gets. But that's another issue.

Just don't do it. It's bad form.

And if that's not enough to persuade you that it's a bad idea, look up "David McOwen," "RC5" and "Georgia" in your favorite search engine.

jeff. road to hell, good intentions, paving work.

But jag could just ASK them if they would let it run. One of the really nice things about this particular distributed computing project is that there's no for-profit company on the other end of it; it's all pure research.

I know the admin (he let me install a few things for when we had to do webdesign work which i considered essential - photoshop and flash) so its cool by him, and geonome@home is done so it dosen't take cycles from any other program, just uses the unused ones so it has zero effect on useability of the computer. Yes the admin ain't too bright, i don't think he set up their backend, its too well done (you don't even need a user/pass to log into any of the normal box's yet every port but 80 and 443 are blocked, and the firewall runs bsd i think. So hes ok with it its just a matter of getting it though their proxy system, its an odd setup, i tried to copy the setting from ie (which are wide open too...), it seems you connect to one proxy, which then lets you though to a second, but i couldn't get it to work...and yes i've heard of that case with that guy shoving seti@home.....crazy
The end boxs are totally insecure, it seems every suer (including jsut hitting esc at the NT logon give you superuser priliges, its crazy, but hey its a girls school, not exact 1337 hax0r land like my school where you can't do *anything* to the computers, including access any folder but temp....

Re: Genome@home
 

yech!! Is that 'Visual Basic' code this is referring to?
Anywho - I can't seem to get to this link at Standford......I think it's down. Anyone know anything about this?

Also....since I'm a latecomer to this thread...how is the team doing?
Please advise.

G@H screwup.....
 

My bad.....
I'm just getting used to the layout here in the_Cellar.

I guess the whole project is done and over? I need to read the rest of these posts.
Disregard any previous mumblings.
thanks -

No, the project goes on but it looks like their server is a little flaky today or something. I could get their front page but couldn't connect to any other pages. Try again later?

we still doing this? my dual g4/800 sits idle most of the day, as does my tbird 750, as will my dual athlon box when i get it, as does my laptop, as does my retro gaming box, as does jenni's imac, as does my dad's linux box...

i'll throw the computers on there if you want... need mac os/osx clients though... do they have 'em?

lemme know if we still doing this :)

All my boxen are still going! The reason the number we're at doesn't move much any more is that we've sorta found our place in the rankings, caught up with all those teams that were producing less than us, I think.

Problem is, there is no Mac client. One of the FAQs said that they might come out with one, but they haven't yet. Right now it's only Win-DOS or Linux.

Maybe OS X? I dunno. Can OS X run any Linux binaries?

OSX and Linux binaries - NOT!
 

From what I've read....OSX uses the MACH kernel inherited from the NEXT project, also inherited by Apple.
The MACH kernel is supposedly decendent of FreeBSD....
I'd bet the farm that it won't run Linux binaries.....however is it not possible to get a hold of the source for the client? I think that you can install a compiler on OSX and therefore, library dependencies permitting, you should be able to compile it.

Just a thought.
I will try and get my box up and running in the team ASAP. I've got some spare cycles I can burn.

In any case, overdue props to Alph for bringing the idea in the first place. All hail Steve!

that's a damn shame. my dual 800mhz g4 is *fast*... a nice multithreaded client for os x would be pretty awesome... and since this system sits idle for probably 20 hours/day....

the dual athlon will be running windows 2000 though (for gaming) so that one should be adequately supported... and should help out...

what's the current rank?

I had to quit running it. It was giving my P1 fits. Had to uninstall it, but I might give it another try.

I check the rank about every day or so, because (sobbing uncontrollably) I HAVE NO LIFE! No, but seriously, we are actually at 101. We ran really fast up the ranking, but we're stuck now, for about the last two weeks we waver between 101 and 104.

Re: OSX and Linux binaries - NOT!
 

No, they won't give it out. From what I recall, they are concerned that some people will get the source code and make their systems quickly return random invalid results, just so they can climb the ranks quickly. And they don't want to have to create code to sort through the mess.

I suppose their assumption is that not many people will go through the trouble of reverse-engineering to achieve this, but many might modifiy the source code if they made it that easy.

Ah, well.

Toad:



I downloaded the Linux client, however my system is telling me that I need GLIBC2.2

are there older versions of the client available that might run....I freaking HATE having to deal with Library dependencies....it's by far my biggest Linux challenge.

Any advice on this one?

I'm running Slackware 7.1

I guess I could hit FM and D/L the latest GLIBC library, but I'm affraid if might replace libraries that my other software is using....and I would hate ot have to recompile everything......

Is there source available for this client?

Please adivse.

I had a look through the message area they have for it, and nobody much discussed that. Someone did hint that it was only the .99 version that doesn't work with the newer glibc, but they want you to download from them and they're only offering the .99 version.

I *may* still have the older linux one, ill have a rummage around in my old downloads.

Tony, from waht i coudl work out since your webdesign firm went belly-up you make your money off co-loc right? How much work would that involve, i'm picturing a pretty easy lifestyle. COrrect me before a order a T3 and Cisco3500 =)

Have you seen the posts I've written asking people if they have any work? Nuff said.

The work related to the co-lo is quite enjoyable, but the co-los themselves don't pay for even the leased line and bandwidth. The management of those co-lo systems does. The continuing web work then makes me about half a living, but half is not enough and if I don't find work by the end of the year I'll be divorced and looking for a new suitable space to locate all these systems. Nuff said again.

hm...
damn
And good luck...

We've broken into double digts
 

As of this morning, we've moved up to #99 on the rankings. It took a long time - we got to 103 and then stopped, and it took forever to move up from there, but we continue to inch up.