Neil Munday from Http://boinc.mundayweb.com April 21, 2006 - Interview number 2 Community Website for BOINC Signatures |
Project Portal: Why did you start the boinc.mundayweb.com site?
Neil Munday: I originally started the site to follow on from the work I did on seti.mundayweb.com for Seti Classic. seti.mundayweb.com was started after I decided to experiment with dynamic image generation using PHP whilst at Uni. Other members of my team noticed I was using my own stats graphics banner and asked if I could make ones for them as well. As a result, seti.mundayweb.com was born. When BOINC started, I noticed that there were hardly any stats graphic sites around, so by "re-jigging" the code for my Seti Classic site, I was able to create boinc.mundayweb.com. Originally I only started to support Seti BOINC, but the site soon expanded to support other major BOINC projects. When the site first launched, it only had 100 users after two days, but by the end of the first week it had over 1,000 users, which was beyond my expectations. Since its early beginnings, the site has undergone many changes, and now supports all the major BOINC projects and has a loyal set of users who help to test out new features, report bugs and help out new users as well. All in all, it's been a much bigger success than I ever imagined.
PP: How many users are there?
NM: Just look at http://boinc.mundayweb.com/one/info.php to find current the number of users. As the site started off as a series of "mini sites" (one for each project) before being converged into the "All-In-One Account", the total number of users can be difficult to ascertain. However, based on my statistics, I would say the number of actual users is 6,000 to 7,000.
PP: On average, how many signature images do you serve up daily?
NM: Again, http://boinc.mundayweb.com/one/info.php lists the number of image hits processed by my site and my network of "mirror sites" that handle the graphic generation. Based on my stats, I would estimate that my site (and the mirrors) handle approximately 125,000 image hits a day.
PP: How quickly did your site grow?
NM: As I mentioned earlier, the site initially started out with about 100 users after a couple of days when the site was launched in July 2004, but by the end of the first week, it had over 1,000 users. Since then, the growth has been steady, but slowed after the initial launch as more stats sites were launched.
PP: This isn't your day job, when you aren't working on the site, what else can people find you doing for work and play?
NM: Indeed, this is not my day job by any means! I enjoy playing football and badminton on the sport front, as well as swimming. My main interests are music and films. I particularly enjoy live music, with my favourite band being Green Day. I enjoy going out, travelling and trying new things, for example, I recently had a go at skiing whilst on business in the USA. It was really good fun and I can't wait to go again!
PP: How do you feel about BOINC and other platforms for distributed computing?
NM: I think BOINC has been a very good evolutionary step from the Seti Classic project. I am a supporter of Open Source software, and I think it's been great that BOINC framework has been released as Open Source software to allow various scientific applications to take advantage of it. In addition, I have been pleased to see that members of the BOINC community have been able to influence its development and to create various add-ons for the various projects, including the several optimised crunching clients and stats services.
In regards to the non-BOINC platforms, I also support them too. Of course, it would be great if they moved to BOINC as well, but I understand that this not always possible. One thing that I do think BOINC is good at it, is its ability to work on multiple platforms - this is something that not all distributed computing platforms can do.
Personally, I think distributed computing is here to stay. As well as the global projects to solve vast computationally intensive problems like climate change and protein folding, several companies are using distributed computing to take advantage of their employees' desktop computers. As a computer scientist, I think this is a great way to maximise your organisation's computational power. Why waste a powerful CPU on Word, when it can also be crunching some proteins or some other modelling data?
PP: Has the influx of new BOINC projects impacted you?
NM: Everytime a new project is launched, users always inform me. It only involves a minimal amount of effort to add a new project to the site thankfully. So long as they provide the XML stats, then myself and other stats sites are able to cope.
PP: What distributed computing projects have you run? What are you running now?
NM: I originally started off with Seti Classic. For BOINC, I now crunch for Seti, Einstein, CPDN, BBC CPDN, LHC, Xtremlab, Pirates@Home , Predictor@Home , and PrimeGrid.
PP: I saw a recent news post that you are looking for a UK based team. (Team Picard where this is hosted considers itself: “International” so I promise not to try and recruit you) What do you look for in a team? What makes a good team? Would you ever start your own team?
NM: A very good question. For a team, I look for a common goal and a sense of belonging, hence the search for a UK based team. I would also look for a team with an active community. This is the main reason I've decided to look for a new team. In regards to starting my own team, I have considered it, but I think there's plenty of choice out there in the major projects. Of course, if anyone wants to start a MundayWeb team, I'd be more than interested in setting it up!
PP: I know that you have made other contributions to the DC community, like the Widget, can you tell us about those? How did they get started?
NM: I have received requests to make stats graphics for other projects like Folding@Home and the Cancer Project. I do run cancer.mundayweb.com for the Cancer Project which has been running since August 2004.
The Yahoo! (formally Konfabulator) and SuperKaramba widgets started as a result of some research conducted as part of my day job. I decided that my BOINC stats site was an ideal candidate for a desktop widget, so I set about creating a Yahoo! Widget for Windows and MAC OS users, and then a SuperKaramba widget for Linux users. They have proved to be very popular and something that other stats sites do not provide (as far as I know). In addition, my users have suggested many new features which has allowed me to develop the widgets to meet their needs. Overall, they've been a great success.
PP: What do you think will happen in the next five years with distributed computing?
NM: A very good question. Distributed computing is certainly here to stay - I think Seti Classic proved this. BOINC has grown steadily, and has a large, loyal community, and I am pleased that BOINC has adopted the Open Source paradigm. Already, there are a large number of projects using the BOINC framework - I can see that this number will continue to rise, it's just a case of which ones survive.
PP: Boincwapstats was a script that allowed sites running php to make a signature very similar to yours, how did you feel about that?
NM: In addition to Boincwapstats, there are various sites that provide similar services to mine. I personally think that myself and other stats sites are here to support the BOINC community - we each have our own unique features and I think it's great that between us, we are able to offer such a large choice to potential users. I am always willing to work with other people (if necessary) to solve common problems. I never think of other stats sites as "the competition", as I never created the site and its services to act in a commercial manner.
PP: What types of things would you like to see the users of distributed computing do to make our hobby better (like you did)?
NM: Again, a very good question. My site doesn't track rank changes etc., but many others do - I think this is really handy (from a statistics point of view). Anything like that is very useful in my opinion. Getting back to the Seti Classic days, I liked the SetiSpy application as it provided you with loads of information about the work unit you were crunching, as it made the data you were processing more real, instead of a bunch of radio signals for example. I believe BOINC Spy exists to do just this. In addition, there also add-ons for FireFox for BOINC. I'm a fan of FireFox and its many extensions, so anything in this area would be of interest to me.
PP: I'd like to thank you for you time talking with us, is there anything that you would like to say?
NM: I'd just like to say thanks to Team Picard for running this series of interviews as it's always nice to be appreciated ;-) And of course, I'd like to thank my users and all those who have suggested new features, found the odd bug, donated money towards the up-keep of the site, and for my mirror providers for helping to keep my bandwidth usage down!
PP: We would like to remind the readers that this like many community sites are funded by donations, like this one. If you use Neil's site, please consider helping him off-set the costs with a donation!