FAQ

FAQ

• 1. General questions
  • 1.1 What does Spinhenge stand for?
  • 1.2 What does Spinhenge@home do?
  • 1.3 Does it use my computer for anything else?
  • 1.4 Server says out of work, why?
• 2. Technical questions
  • 2.1 What are the minimum requirements for the participating?
  • 2.2 How long does one workunit last?
  • 2.3 The graphics is slower on my computer when it runs as a screensaver than when I choose show graphics from boinc, why?
  • 2.4 How and when do I get credit? (also: Why my results aren't validated?)
  • 2.5 When linux application/screen saver will be available?
  • 2.6 Where should I report bugs/errors?
  • 2.7 Why I get errors when uploading/downloading?
• 3. The website
  • 3.1 Why doesn't some pages seem to get updated (e.g. Top Users)?
  • 3.2 I signed up but did not receive an email, why not?

1. General questions

1.1 What does Spinhenge stand for?

Spinhenge stands for Spin Dynamics. You can read about it here.

1.2 What does Spinhenge@home do?

Have a look here.

1.3 Does it use my computer for anything else?

No. The computers of the participants are only used for this purpose.

1.4 Server says out of work, why?

Spinhenge@home calculations consist of many separate studies. Some studies can be started only after the previous have been analysed. We are doing our best to give out work at all times, but sometimes we just need to analyse old results before we can give out more. When this happens, please contribute to some other BOINC project(s) until we are able to submit new work. (Of course you can always participate to many BOINC projects simultaneously). You can find list of public BOINC projects here.





2. Technical questions

2.1 What are the minimum requirements for the participating?

The most important things are amount of RAM and disk space on your computer. Currently 64MB of free RAM and 30MB of free disk space is required before the server gives work to a computer. Deadline of work units is currently one week, so your computer must be fast enough to complete a work unit in this time. If your computer would be doing Spinhenge@home calculation most of the time, any Pentium-class CPU or faster shoud do. However, if the BOINC client is running rarely or it is mostly used for some other projects, a faster CPU is needed.

In short:


• Operating System: Windows 95 or newer (better is Windows 2000/XP)
• RAM: 64MB
• HDD: 30MB
• CPU: Pentium-class or better

2.2 How long does one workunit last?

This naturally depends on the speed of your computer. At the moment workunits may have different lengths. More information about the lenght of a workunit you can get here.

2.3 The graphics is slower on my computer when it runs as a screensaver than when I choose show graphics from boinc, why?

The speed of the graphics depends on the speed of the hardware. As a screensaver, the graphics run in full-screen, which takes more GPU (Graphic Processor Unit) power than running it in a smaller window. Displaying the graphics might slow down the Spinhenge calculations.

2.4 How and when do I get credit?

The new validator works like this:

• A workunit gets validated when it has 3 identical results.
• Users that returned identical results will get same amount of credit, which is an average of claimed credit when lowest and highest value is ignored. In most cases this is the median of the claimed credits. This credit is called "canonical credit".
• If work unit has 10 successful results but there are not enough identical results, the results are granted points according to how well they match with other results. The best-matching result will receive median average of claimed credits (calculated in same way as the canonical credit). Other results will get credit proportional to the best credit and result's match points. Although users get credit from this kind of results, the results are not used in physical studies.

Please note that different CPU architectures may yield different floating point results. This is especially true between Pentium and Athlon CPUs. Although differing results are not used in physical studies, they may still be useful to us in finding possible problems in our software. Of course, this requires that the CPU used for calculations doesn't produce real errors. This can happen especially on overclocked CPUs. Even if the overclocked system seems to work fine (maybe an unexplained crash once in a month or so) it might skip one bit in one of the 10^14 floating point calculations commonly done in a work unit, producing highly different end result. Such a bad results will actually cause gray hairs to us, so if you have overclocked CPU and get lots of unvalidated results, consider lowering the clock speed or detaching from the project.

2.5 When linux application/screen saver will be available?

When we find enough time to do it.

2.6 Where should I report bugs/errors?

The preferred ways of reporting bugs/errors is first to check if the bug already exists on the known bugs list, if not you should post the bug on a message board.

2.7 Why I get errors when uploading/downloading?

If you get errors like this:
SCHEDULER_REPLY::parse(): bad first tag Content-type: text/plain
Can't parse scheduler reply

Then the servers are most likely overloaded and cannot serve all connections.
This happens commonly after servers have been out of work for long time or after network / service breaks. Just be patient...


There are also other reasons causing download to fail. Some of those may be fixed by resetting your client, some may be server-related. Personal firewall software is also known to cause problems.





3. The website

3.1 Why doesn't some pages seem to get updated (e.g. Top Users)?

Boinc caches the most common pages to reduce server load. The caching time is up to 12 hours, so the information is up to half day old at most.

3.2 I signed up but did not receive an email, why not?

All our outgoing mail has to go through the main FH-Bielefeld queue, and some mailservers does not want to talk to ours. In some cases it can take up to several hours for these mails to arrive. Please be patient. If you have not received the mail within 24 hours then try again or check your SPAM folder.