Dear WCG Crunchers,

We want to give everyone a quick update about the scientific status of the project. First, we want to apologize for the bad work units. While it is no excuse, the errors occur in only some of each randomized set and we somehow avoided them in our in-house testing. There are two main causes of the errors that we have seen:

1) If you have been following the progress of your work units on the graphs, you can see that the energy of the system fluctuates with each step. Sometimes, the position of atoms late in the run causes the energy of the system to change by more than is "reasonable" for the simulation and the work unit errors out.

2) The work units that error out faster are due to the random placement of the molecules causing a lot of atoms to be close to "edge" of the simulation, which causes an error when the energy of the system is evaluated.

And now for the good news: both of these errors are more prevalent in certain types of simulations we are running, so we have removed these from the queue. We have also been learning from the results we have already gotten back. The next batch of work units we send will take everything we have learned so far into account.

The CEP team is very thankful to everyone who has been crunching away. This is the biggest set of simulations we have ever had the chance to run and we are really excited about the future of the project! biggrin

The CEP Team
[Jan 24, 2009 11:10:20 PM]