While I had a few HTTP errors when uploading, they were just the result of using mismatched wireless devices locally; I have similar errors with other projects on the same system. I’m now up to about 6days CEP2 per day. Hope to grow to around 10 by the end of the month, but it will be well into March before I can increase further.

[ot]Would be great if any of the intermittent projects were scheduled, even for a few weeks; I fell well short on all fronts :(

Prof. Vijay Pande from Stanford University visited Harvard Chemistry today and gave a talk titled ‘Some surprises in the biophysics of protein folding’. What does that have to do with CEP?

Well, Vijay is the founder of folding@home – one of the most successful distributed volunteer computing projects in science! He has about 80x more users than CEP... We had a very interesting discussion over lunch. Turns out that our output-files are about the same size - so maybe we don’t need to feel too bad about them after all.
Anyways, folding@home has been going strong for over 10 years now and has produced a number of very neat results. Way to go!

http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Main

Today we had a WCG-setup-palooza-party in the Aspuru-Guzik group: All the new machines were set up with WCG and all the old ones got a CEP2 specific tune up. We should have about 75 more cores running CEP2 now. And afterwards we had Pizza ;).

The beauty of grid tied solar panels:

I live in Yuma AZ. Sunny most of the year, spring like weather in the winter, yet hot in the summer. In AZ, there are two different rates for electricity that are based on the time of the year. The rates for the half of the year that include the summer months are higher than the rates that include the winter half of the year. Because my household uses most of its electricity in the summer (AC is on), Summer bills can be well over 400, while winter bills were around 100. In addition, I am on the 12-7 plan. This is a billing system where the rates from 12 noon to 7 pm are around 4 times higher than the rates from 7pm to 12 noon. In the winter, i use very little electricity from 12 noon to 7pm, so my solar panels are producing more electricity than I use. In the winter months, my usage from 7pm to 12 noon increases slightly (more lights on). Because solar panels do not produce much during those hours, I use electricity from the grid. This electricity is at the lower rates (.06)KWH or so. the extra electricity produced from my panels creates a bank of KWH. This bank is not used towards my 7pm-noon usage because of the difference in rates. It is instead saved from month to month. When summer hits, and I am using more electricity during the noon-7pm time frame, I begin to use up my bank. If any bank exists on DEC 31st, for either time frame, noon-7pm or 7pm-noon, I get paid out by the electric company. In effect, what this does is allow me to provide electricity in the winter months, and use the electricity in the summer months. In the last year, my winter bills dropped from the $100's to the $60's, yet my summer bills dropped from the mid $300's-mid $400's to the $100's-$120's. Essentially I now pay nothing for electricity from noon-7 (at the .24KWH rates) and I only pay for electricity used during the off-peak hours off 7pm to noon (at the .06KWH rate). Even though my solar panels provide only half my electricity usage, my yearly electric bill dropped 63%.

Carlos is back in Boston for a while to finish the work on our paper on cheminformatics models for OPV performance parameters.
http://www.quimica.unam.mx/ficha_investigador.php?ID=77&tipo=2