I feel your pain, managed to miss out on the monster wu's for HCMD2

I just got one that was estimated a little over 6 hours when received. After only 7 minutes of run time the estimate to completion had fallen to 3:30, after 8 minutes it was down to 3 hours, after 9 minutes 2:30, and now at 12 minutes the time to completion is down to 1 hour 29 minutes.

That's a Win XP Athlon 3200+ with 1GB (2.24 GFlOps typical).

After 16 minutes the estimated time left is down to 39 minutes.

The slicing/estimating process definitely still needs some tweaking.

Same here

More info -

We have started a second round of this beta test with application version 6.13. This test includes a fix for the older processors on linux errors.

This test also includes a revised strategy for controlling the max run length for the workunits. It will work as follows:

Each workunit is assigned a time limit. The beta workunits running now have a time limit of 1 hour.

When the time limit is reached, the application checks to see how many positions out of the total required for the workunit have been computed.

If at least 60% of the total positions have been computed, then it continues processing.

If less than 60% have been computed, then it exits and returns its results to the server.

If twice the limit is reached, then it exits and returns its results to the server.

The server will check to see if the workunit computed all the positions required. If not, then one or more child workunits will be created to compute the remaining positions.

This process will allow us to provide more consistent length workunits and have a control in place to prevent the exceptionally large workunits from running for a long length (they will instead be broken up into multiple smaller workunits).

...but if your 2 wingmen get in before yours start, they will be auto aborted!