I know the CPDN programmers have a lot to worry about; but, yikes, I spent a lot of CPU time on this. It\'s the only distributed computing project worth a d*mn. What a shame. I would have at least expected an e-mail or some sort announcement / thank you from the CPDN team before they pulled the Mac plug.

I hope someday we will get Macs back, but due to our computing (two people doing everything) and budget constraints, we weren\'t able to support Macs for the latest experiment. The new Intel Macs are probably our best hope (if we can get our hands on one, and the new Intel Mac Fortran compiler...)

As a reaction, I deleted the sulphur cycle model on my PowerMac G5 after running for about 50 %.
Only two bad paid programmers are not enough for such a complex distributed computing project. Moreover, the project\'s budget limitations don\'t seem to allow a professional attitude.
There are enough other projects on the market (f.e. einstein@home, seti@home, rosetta@home etc.), which urgently need the crunching power of Apple cpus too.

Okay, have it your way then !

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you need some common sense -- you can\'t blame us for our low budget, being underpaid etc. sheesh half the critics think \"we\'re only in it for the money\" and I\'m still wondering where all of this money is! We\'re doing stuff that is orders of magnitude more complicated than any other project out there. Climate models are the toughest thing a PC can run. And I\'m sorry but 33% of our time for Mac development for 2% of our users is just not making things a high priority for us. perhaps if we had commercial support etc it would make it possible, but that never happens.

Carl:
I don\'t blame anybody here. Nevertheless the Mac-support was poor right from the beginning. One model after the other crashed again and again for months. Now there isn\'t any work left for the Apple-platform - surprise, surprise!

Okay, but why did you ever try to support MacOSX ? A clear statement right from the beginning would have been the correct way to treat things. And I wouldn\'t have spent money for electricity consumption, while crunching for climateprediction.net. Einstein@home f.e. needs every cruncher the project can get.

Moreover, you want people to run your models for four months and longer round the clock using powerful cpus. I am convinced, that the developing and programming of such complex models is very complicated and time-intensive. Therefore it doesn\'t make any sense, that this is done by only two programmers and an obviously low budget. Tell your leading staff that they cannot drink champaigne and pay only for mineral water. This is the main reason why I don\'t trust the efforts of your project any longer. Good luck for the future - you will need it !

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We\'ve had plenty of Mac people run OK, especially before BOINC drastically changed the way Mac\'s operated (i.e. before the BOINC Manager was on the Mac). But Mac\'s just don\'t have the greatest Fortran compilers as compared with Windows & Linux. Perhaps it will change with the Intel Macs (& Intel Mac Fortran compiler). E@h doesn\'t need any more crunchers than any other project out there. But they have simpler requirements for distributing their jobs than we do, and they have a much bigger computing staff so of course they can provide Mac support easier than us.

But in the grand scheme of things, Windows is still like 85-88% of the users of volunteer computing projects, Linux 10-13%, and Mac\'s 2-3%. So other than appeasing \"Mac advocacy\" zealots it just hasn\'t been fruitful to spend a third of the time for 2% of the users. We basically did it in the first place because we LIKE Mac\'s and want to see everything supported; plus we figured Mac\'s would show up as being speed demons (which unfortunately hasn\'t been what we found with the Fortran compilers).

But in the grand scheme of things, Windows is still like 85-88% of the users of volunteer computing projects, Linux 10-13%, and Mac\'s 2-3%.

Perhaps a little outreach might have been called for, since I very much doubt the installed base of Linux is 10x that of OSX. A few phonecalls to MacUser, say, or dare I say it, the Advanced Computation Group at Apple, who created xGrid .

Right now rosetta is getting the beneifit of my CPU and a sulphur model got dumped 20% of the way through.

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IanC

If you check the figures at BOINCstats, for ANY of the many projects, you can see that Mac users are \'thin on the ground\' everywhere.

LesBayliss:

Nevertheless, einstein@home and seti@home are offering clients even for the new Intel-version of MacOSX. I am convinced, that projects like Rosetta@home, Folding@home and other \"proteine-crunchers\" etc. will follow quickly. There are millions of powerful Macs available on this planet, which can offer a lot of crunching power. I am not a programmer, but I was told that there is at least one powerful Fortran-compiler available for MacOSX.

What has made me angry is the fact, that people taking part in climateprediction.net have to fulfill the highest standards of all currently available projects. 24 hours runtime around the clock all over the year, 1 GB memory and more, only the strongest cpus, several gigabytes of harddisk-space and so forth. On the other hand a pitifull small project staff without enough fundation.That\'s really poor !

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When there WAS work for Macs a year ago, there were very few Mac users who showed up to run the project.

Funding and staff are a matter for Oxford Uni.
As someone who lives on almost the exact opposite side of the planet with no connection to any part of the project other than being a keen cruncher, there\'s not much I can do about it.

Well I have just orderd a lovely CPDN mug !!!

If more of us do this maybe Mac support/Better hardware/better tools/more devel people will be provided.

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For one thing, the astronomical projects have 4 times the staff & 10 times the hardware we do, and the various chem/pharma/folding projects have even more money out the wazoo as well. And they have a codebase to worry about that\'s at most 1/10th the size of ours, and much less complex than a legacy, non-linear climate model.

I mean, they can dedicate 1-2 people just on Mac client development, whereas Tolu & I have to cover everything. Believe me, I wish we had a ton of funding for more staff & equipment, but we have to make do with what little we have. I consider us sort of like the Beatles still having to use 4-track recording equipment at Abbey Road even though most studios were already at 16 or 24-track! :-)

We like Macs, really we do, but we simply don\'t have the resources to allocate to it based on the numbers of users we\'ve had in the past. And Fortran support on Macs for running a climate model is appalling. You get very slow performance & memory-hog compilers & executables etc. It would have been nice if Apple were able to give us some hardware or some computer staff (or $ or £) but that never happened, and since this project is more \"triage\" than software development, I\'m afraid the Mac\'s have temporarily been cut.

It\'s the only distributed computing project worth a d*mn. What a shame. I would have at least expected an e-mail or some sort announcement / thank you from the CPDN team before they pulled the Mac plug.

full ackn!

for me, i will also change the other PC\'s (= non-Mac\'s) to a different project, while they\'r running Linux and the support may also be ended in future! (\"10-13%\" Linux may also not enough for the programmers)
- though CPDN was my favorite.

10% Linux is one thing. 2-3% Mac is another.

IanC
If you check the figures at BOINCstats, for ANY of the many projects, you can see that Mac users are \'thin on the ground\' everywhere.

And? This just emphasises the need for a little outreach, given the likely relative installed base of Mac and Linux.

I\'ve never read about distributed computing in the Mac press. Do any of the projects even have a press officer?

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I\'ve never read about distributed computing in the Mac press. Do any of the projects even have a press officer?

HAHA what project would be able to afford a press officer? It would be far better to spend the money on another helping hand (programmer). A better question is -- does Apple give a damn about distributed computing? Microsoft & IBM sure do. Perhaps the answer is Apple only wants to push XGrid (I really don\'t know).

Surely Oxford Uni has a press officer, and probably a whole department of people who are good at getting money out of large corporations. Someone was switched on enough to get the BBC involved after all!

As you suggest, Apple is the most obvious company to sponsor the climate prediction work for Macs, if only to show the world that they take \"corporate responsibility\" seriously. Has anyone asked them?

I\'ve never read about distributed computing in the Mac press. Do any of the projects even have a press officer?

HAHA what project would be able to afford a press officer? It would be far better to spend the money on another helping hand (programmer). A better question is -- does Apple give a damn about distributed computing? Microsoft & IBM sure do. Perhaps the answer is Apple only wants to push XGrid (I really don\'t know).

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Someone was switched on enough to get the BBC involved after all!

I think that was the other way around. The BBC wanted something \'scientificy\' for their climate program. With a pretty picture, which is why they kept calling it a \'screen saver\' program.

I had my G5 PowerMac crunching away for a couple of years on CPDN, and I think I\'m right in saying that not one of my work units completed properly, although I was given credit for them anyway. So I gave up in the end (thinking that the planet would be better off if I saved the electricity instead), a few months before the plug was pulled on Mac support. My solution? A battered old 1200MHz AMD Athlon PC that I rescued from its journey to landfill and stuck in a back room in my flat. Now that churns away slowly but usefully (two work units successfully completed so far) and my G5 gets to rest - which will probably extend its working life.

I think its not fair to blame the CPDN staff. There probably are not many, maybe there is no scientific topic argued as controversially as the global climate change.

Research on climate change is regularly being attacked by highly funded campaigns like recently published at streams.cei.org (quote: \"CO2 - they call it pollution, we call it life\"), or by wanna-be \"thrillers\" like Crichton\'s \"State of fear\".

While protein folding finally may be seen as at least potentially supporting industrial interests, too (or does any folding cruncher believe to be provided pharmaceutic remedies possibly somewhen developed as an outcome of the project for free?), climate research is tackled e.g. by intense resistance from some fossil resource multinationals.

Under such circumstances I am not surprised that the CPDN project has to face a difficult financial situation. But is it their fault that major global players have an evident interest in keeping down the truth about global climate change?

Additionally, I think Apple users are a very specific group, which (as I believe) mainly consists of two major parts: The one are professionals working in the advertisment and media industry, with their machines located in agencies and companies; they won\'t care a lot for distributed computing, unless they can instrumentalize it for customer relationships.

A large share of the second, non-professional group seem to me to be sumthing like \"lifestyle junkies\", who probably are not at all interested in projects like CPDN. I assume those donating their CPU time here to probably be more or less rare exceptions among the already small absolute number of Mac users.

So, if the conditions for the project staff are as described here, I hope it will benefit CPDN, for the project\'s importance will not be less if I cannot contribute any longer. Of course I regret not to be able to contribute anymore. Should that be reason to turn against those people, who will continue doing the most important distributed computing project I know? Is the project suddenly becoming less important? I don\'t think so.

\"Just one more thing\": After here there are working two G4s (a G400 and a Dual 1,25 GHz), my next machine will probably be some x86, to dig myself deeper into Linux. So, maybe I will be back then ... Until then: Good luck to CPDN!

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