I don't know if all these beta WUs are running the same but, so far, mine seems very linear and after 10 % done a simple extrapolation was giving an estimated total CPU time within 10 % of what it might be. After 20 % the approximation was probably less than 5 % and this convergence seems to be confirmed percent after percent.

So take the CPU time at a given checkpoint, extrapolate with the percentage already done and you can forget about what BOINC Manager might be telling you about how long remains to be done.

Let's see...what to respond to first...

The screen saver. The work units without the BETA tag were not disabled. Our general practice is to disable the screen saver on BETA work units. Since they were not labeled as such when loaded the screen saver should have worked like it would in production.

Linear progression in time. Jean, your assumption of being able to extrapolate the total runtime is correct. Generally there may be a variance of +/- 5 minutes per large loop. But if you have reached 10% you should be able to take this equation to find out your machines proper remaining work time.

<time completed> - (100.0 / <percent complete> * <time completed>)

time completed is how much cpu time is listed in your task manager. So say it shows 30 hours 15 minutes...this would be 30.25. 30 hours 45 minutes is 30.75...

percent complete is the percentage number. so if boinc shows 50.08%, you would just use 50.08 for this value. No need to decrease it by 100.

I need to read a few more posts and respond...

Hope this helps,
-Uplinger

Memory requirements...

Well at the moment we set the minimum memory needed available on the system to 768 MB of Ram. On Linux I have seen about 250MB of physical RAM used and 550 MB of virtual. I expect most of the type A's to fall around this size. The size of memory used varies on the size of the molecule being calculated...larger molecule, more memory.

But at this point I would guess that 400MB physical RAM will be used per work unit. With virtual being about twice the size of physical memory usage.

-Uplinger

It's been a very smooth BETA so far. My i7's should starting completing in <4 hours, the Q6600's in about 8 hours. The poor old Pentium D is huffing and puffing at only 44% complete. I should rebuild that machine but it like throwing away your favorite sweatshirt ... even though it is worn out ... you just hate to part with it.

Guess you have the wrong wingmen... ;-)
Mine (although I do not know him) was reliable and returned his result ahead of me. So WU erlc_a007_ps0000 completed and validated. :-)
And meanwhile the second wingman returned his result too - don't know who was first. Anyway, the WU is valid, that's most important!