Table of contents |
Creation
The AMD Users team came into being in January 8th 2002, founded by Shnal on the Ãœbero project. Starting with less than 5 members, but with a great will to prevail, the team quickly started gathering more members and expanding to other projects.
The need for member to member communication arose as the number of members grew, and the previously used means (emails and the Ubero message boards) were no longer enough to satisfy the team's needs, thus the first AMD Users website was born by the hand of Shnal, who was learning HTML in college at the time and used his knowledge for the benefit of the Team. As time passed the site continued to evolve rapidly, and soon bwhite, who was one of the first members of AMD Users, hosted it on his own webspace (amerak.com).
On July 10th 2003, when the team was a year and a half old, the definitive domain was acquired (amdusers.com) and a new and improved PHP based website complete with message boards and other features, was deployed online two days later, by spjeff69, who also took care of its administration and further developments.
Evolution
Due to personal life evolutions, Shnal, spjeff69, bwhite and all other influential members were not as often present to help lead the team as in the early days, and because managing a full fledged online community can be a full time job, spjeff69 promoted long time member vaughan to the status of administrator as well, to help him oversee and manage the community.
On May 10th 2004, another key figure of the AMD Users history joined the Team. It was ototero, who later became the Team's official "statsman", developing and maintaining a wealth of individual and team wide statistics pages focused on the Team and its members across dozens of Distributed Computing projects.
The very first large scale internal competition of AMD Users took place on March 20th 2005. It was the AMD Users Performance Contest - Spring 2005, organized and maintained by NeoGen, for the nearly three months of its duration.
On April 9th 2005, the first issue of the AMD Users Newsletter went live, edited by AMDave. It consisted on a simple roundup of the team's ranks and points at the projects it participated, plus the special events recorded on the previous month and a few member contributions.
Through out the years of 2005 and 2006, there was a distributed computing phenomena sparked by the BOINC platform public availability and its constant improvement. The number of public Distributed Computing projects doubled in two years, increasing the scientific research in all areas of knowledge. This also led to an incredible ammount of new people joining the effort of distributed computing, due to the growing publicity both online and through other means of communication (TV, radio, newspapers, etc) and consequently led to an enormous increase in the number of members of the AMD Users team.
On December 1st 2006, the AMD Users wiki site went live. After more than one and a half years of gathering and compiling historical data, the first release of this grand project with all the information about the team was released to public. And because the Team is alive and always striving in new directions, the information here presented is constantly revised and new one is added when available.
In 2007, due to the exponential increase of projects in the previous years, along with some unfortunate events, the AMD Users Newsletter was put on hold. But the thought still remains active, with ideas for new features to be added and more information to be included in coming issues.
The 1,000 forum members milestone was achieved in early 2008, little after the Team celebrated its 6th birthday. Also in the same year, project NanoHive@Home was closed, leaving the AMD Users Team officially ranked World #1 for the first time in a finished project.
At the same time a revolution began in distributed computing, after several years of research and development it became possible to harness the power of GPU's and other dedicated processors to contribute to distributed projects. Most notably Nvidia's CUDA, and ATI's Stream technologies started to be applied to distributed computing to harness the power of the millions of graphics cards spread all around the world with outstanding results. A dedicated GPU from a graphics card is in essence a RISC based processor, and has a processing capacity of up to 50x more than a normal CPU. That sparked a great interest by many project developers, and increased computing capacity tenfold in the following years.
In July 13th 2010, AMD Users crossed yet another historical milestone, in achieving its first one billion BOINC credits (or cobblestones). At the date only a very small number of teams have achieved this. The original BOINC Credits system states that 100 cobblestones are awarded for 1 days work to a PC that is capable of 1,000 double-precision MIPS, and although this may not be true for every project, it is safe to assume that AMD Users achieved at least the equivalent to 5,000,000 days worth of computing, in approximately 5 years, by an unknown number of PCs in BOINC projects alone.
Present Day
Nowadays the team has grown to over 1,200 forum members, and over 2,500 team members, from more than 60 different countries contributing computer time to science in over 80 of the distributed computing projects that are available to the general public, as of 2010. As a result, the AMD Users team is among the world's largest and most powerful teams in distributed computing of all time.