xzer,

Have a look at this chart: http://bit.ly/WCGART which tells the last day and seven day average run time of all computer together at WCG. This will indicate to you which sciences you may choose from a pure time perspective, with HCC the shortest, with a 7 day deadline. All others have a 10 day deadline.

At the moment there is a little work for HCMD2. Those tasks are very light and cut off for your computer at 6 hours, no matter how slow or fast a device is. Those used to be ideal for machines that just get maybe 1 hour a day of crunching time.

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Thank you for all of these replies.

To pcwr:

Yes, there are several projects maintaining short time on my computer, but the problem is that I do not know which are exactly. So I believe there should be an intelligent approach to addressing this issue rather than collecting information and judging it by myself.

To SekeRob:

The average time chart can not help me to judge which project I should choose because the calculating ability of my computer is not at average level. Further more, suppose that I have more than one computers and some of them are running all the time and some of them are running with limited time, I believe that a per computer configuration is more flexible and reasonable.

To gb009761:

My cache setting is 0.3 day almost equal 0, thus my computer only fetch new tasks in fact. The problem is the under-average level calculating ability and limited calculating time. I do not think it is a good idea that to collect information by myself and try to choose an adequate project by myself. At lease, I hope there is a report to tell me that how much time each project unit would take on each of my computers, that would help many people who are in the same situation with me.

It helps most anyone to guesstimate the duration by approximation of the sciences. E.g. If your device did recent FAAH in 8 hours on your device and the mean on the chart indicates 6 hours, it's reasonable to consider that all other sciences will run a factor 1.33 longer on the device. If the chart then indicates a 7 hours average for HPF2, your specific device will do a a mean of 9.3 hours.

As was noted, BOINC has some learning ability of how much it can do in the future based on what it's done in recent past. If it finds that up-time hours for a new task are not enough to finish before deadline, it will give a message to say that the device is on for X% and allowed to compute for Y% of that time, and would not finish in time, refuse to assign to that device, for that science task.

An option of 'give me short, give me long' is one in the far off future where tasks are dynamically sized *if they can be*. It would be going along the line of light and heavy, where the servers track how potent a device is. It is already in a fashion because it's computing the credit [points] based on performance. Light and heavy would of course be useless, if you'd only select one or few sciences. Little room to maneuver.

Till then, the current goal is to have the project averages sit around 6 hours. With *non-deterministic* calculations many of these science calculations are, that can still mean 8 hours next week and 4 hours the week after. The WCGART chart indicates the variances seen in the past 6 months. Assuming you have after a while some feel how your device(s) compute relative to this reference, you can make your choices, but automated it aint. I know putting CEP2 in the profile connected to the centrino laptop is not good. It's good at Clean water though and Help Conquer Cancer. I don't have them in the profile for the I7.

Who said that distributed computing was set and forget?

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P.S. We have officially 4 supported device profiles [My Grid > Device Manager > Device Profiles] to which you can assign a computer, each with different preferred science selections and different resource permissions and compute/network settings. There's Default, and the user creatable School, Work, Home. Private profiles can be defined too and stored on the server, but they are A) involved in creation, B) not supported [it's a fluke discovered by a member that was allowed to continue... these profiles show up in the device profile selection list]. They can lead to unexpected trouble if also volunteering the devices outside WCG.

for a system that's only on a few hours a week, I certainly would NOT recommend CEP2 - even though it has a fixed cut-off point at 12 hours. Basically, the second step is so long, that if the computer is being shut down pretty regular, it'd never get past this step.