Biggles (0)
Number of visits to this profile: 770
BAM! user since: May 10 2006
Country: Kiribati
Detailed stats: here
Forum posts: 12
Founder of team: Ars Technica


My personal background
I'm a computer scientist from Glasgow, Scotland. I've been into distributed computing for several years. The beginnings of when it became an addiction were when I joined Grid.org and ran the cancer project for a while, leaving my sole computer on 24/7. After a while I then discovered Find-A-Drug, which I believed to be a better project all round. What had really sold it to me was the Multiple Sclerosis work they were doing. That project shut at the beginning of this year and since then I have become a mercenary, pushing Ars Technica in just about every project.

Over the past two years my farm has grown from 633 MHz to almost 30 GHz. And it might get bigger yet ;-)

I love distributed computing because it's such a simple concept. It's almost recycling - we gather the unused cycles and put them towards a worthy aim, something that might make a bit of difference to the world. Some of us take it a bit too far and have large personal farms, but hey it's an addiction. But the basic concept is wonderful.

I crunch for Ars Technica because it simply is the best tech site on the internet. It's not overly commercial, it has one of the best forums around with a far more intelligent level of discussion and expertise than most others and it also has a great IRC channel. Quite simply, there is no better place to get an overview or explanation of the IT world. Since I spend a lot of time browsing there, it makes sense for me to be a part of their vibrant and large DC team.

When I'm not checking every possible DC stat in the world I can be found playing Xbox, playing guitar or even, just sometimes, reading.

Opinion about BOINCstats/BAM!
BOINCstats.com is awesome! It's by far the best BOINC stats site as it pulls together all projects, has combined BOINC stats, has them on a per host basis etc. It even has pie charts damnit!

BAM I use, but not much. Main reason for that is that I have a few borgs out there which I've never been able to upgrade to newer versions of BOINC, and partly because I'm happy to micro-manage everything manually anyway. At some point though, I'll get round to updating them all.

In the mean time I'm happy to use the premier BOINC resource for all my stats needs.