Thank you VAIO. Thank you Dave.

Welcome back Graham
Registered Member Since: 11/16/2004
Activity Summary - My Accumulated Points: 349,999 My Current Ranking: 700
You can't get any closer to a nice round 350k than that

Congratulations to nl59056, Siseberg and Tychirp for breaking their next barriers!!

Congratulations also to our Captain for reaching 250,000 -- grmmmbbbllll, he escaped me on that race but I'm only 2 MOT-places behind. Since the new "hall of fame" banners have 300K instead of 250K I'm afraid I have to beat you on the next banner, David

Regarding super-fast PCs and fantastic WCG scores: remember that all power above score 200 does not add anything to your points!! The point gain by a single WCG client is limited to twice the speed of the reference machine. An example:

Imagine a work unit that would run 8 hours on the WCG reference machine (score 100). Now imagine two PCs (named P200 and P400) with a score of 200 and 400, respectively. The score suggests (and lets assume this is right) that P200 crunches the above work unit in half the time (as it's twice as fast as the reference machine) and P400 needs only a fourth of the time -- 2 hours -- as it is four times as fast as the reference machine.

Now imagine that the reference machine (and all machines equally fast) gets 20 points per hour. A faster machine (score above 100) gets more points -- e.g. a machine with a score of 150 will get 150/100 = 1.5 times the points per hour (that's 30 points in our example). P200 would get 40 points per hour, twice the speed -- twice the points. Now comes the "200% limit rule": no machine can ever earn more than twice the points of the reference machine. So P400 *also* gets 40 points per hour!!

Now what does that mean for earned points and other statistics: two PCs - one with a score of 200 and one far above -- earn the same number of points over time! While the faster one needs less time per work unit (and thus processes more work units -- better "number of returned results") it does not give a boost to your total points. This can only be achieved if you are able to run more than one client on the machine (e.g. using virtual machines on a dual core or dual CPU).

Of course, sending more results back to WGC helps to finish the project (and its successors) faster so for WGC there is a gain, just not for your personal stats (besides your "returned results").

Another note regarding the apparent increase of huge work units:

One explanation might be statistics. Many people start running a WCG client and then quit at one time. See how many people are registered and how many actually return results. Other reasons beside quitting exist why some work units were sent but result were never sent back yet (slow machines used very rarely, hardware or software failures resulting in a re-install of the client, etc.). The larger a work unit is, the more likely it is that it is never sent back. Why? Simple statistics plus psychology. Statistics say that a random quit more likely hits a large (long duration) unit than a small (short duration). And an intentional quit might be like "I will quit after this work unit finishes" or "I'll quit but lets not waste that 97%". This "finish first" will also be more likely for work units that are shorter as we are talking about slow machines (no real supercruncher will ever quit, I guess). If you want to quit but see that you only need 3 more hours you will rather complete it -- if it takes another 46 hours (and you only use your PC for 3 hours per day) you will quit immediately. In other words: *IF* a work unit is never completed (by intention or by chance) then it's more probable that it's a long work unit than it's a short one.

I'm pretty sure that if a work unit is sent out and after quite some time no result is sent back, this work unit is scheduled for "recycling" (i.e. marked to be sent out again). Which means that towards the end of the project we will see much more large units (recycled ones, that is) than in the days where it all started.

I consider this conclusive :-)


Best wishes, Stefan.

I have run into an interesting effect. My lowly PII has been crunching along with an impressie composite score of 62. It was giving me a consistent 12.06 points per hour. It was running off a 2 GB hard drive (It is an very old machine but I won't tell you how expensive it was when I bought it in '96). I reinstalled so that the client was running off a network hard drive with 20 GB free. The composite score went up to 70 (yahoo) but after monitoring the points per hour for a while I have found that they have stayed the same at 12.06. Since the composite went up 13% I would have expected the same change in the points per hour. This machine is dedicated to crunching and runs only the WCG client. The results for both sets of numbers are based on multiple results.

My earlier analysis (I am an engineer) shows that the the points per hour and the composite rating show a good correlation to each other when you look at the ratios betwen them on my 5 machines so I expected the points per hour to change. The only thing I can think of is that my default profile is 10 GB and somehow I was getting credit for this amount of disk space and not what the local client shows - the client did show the lower score when it was ruing from the 2 GB. Another thought is that somehow the client is ignoring the composite and still picking up the small local hard drive.

Anybody run into this before? I couldn't find anything like it in the forums.

Schlange --

We wish you success in your effort. May I recommend that you all stick together as a team and not keep re-inventing yourselves. I think you have lost a few members as you have closed down one team to create a new identity for whatever reason you have. I for one have been a bit puzzled by this, but whatever works for you.

Wishing you the best of luck,