I basically haven't run OPN since I got my 5 year badge in July 2020 (or so). At the time, I was waiting for the GPU app. I ran a few OPNG tasks but mostly on Google Colab.

I'm 100% in favour of shifting as much OPN to the GPU app as possible. Given OPN has a GPU app available, efficiency is far greater and the CPU is far more valuable on other projects, as others have mentioned.

I had noticed OPN was running far less tasks and CPU years per day while other projects were getting a higher share. Now I know why.

A notice/news article is a good idea. Keep it up.

I'll switch to the mapping cancer markers project too

I've thought right from the start of the AD-GPU work for OPN that it would be best to discourage use of CPUs for the project. However, I remember reading at the time that WCG considered the CPU work very important too, as it would be used for docking the smaller ligands. But there was no mention of why the smaller ligands could not be run on GPUs instead. Knreed's post above indicates that the policy of wishing to dock the smaller ligands only on CPUs has now changed.

So, I have duly tweaked my WCG Device Profiles to disable downloading OPN CPU work or limit the number of WUs to 4 or fewer. At the same time, I set MCM and MIP to receive unlimited WUs. My work caches are set to 0.6 days' work.
Now most of my devices, including those that have never run AD-GPU, have downloaded crazy amounts of MCM and MIP WUs, like 743 x MCM plus 237 x MIP in one case. Previously, allowing unlimited OPN1 WUs in my Device Profiles did not result in this behaviour. What is going on?

Yoerik,

Thank you for your reply, but I don't entirely understand it.

I don't advocate for any adjustment that requires people to be active in the forums. Hopefully the administrators see us as a representative sample for the many donors who sign up and tune out. That's why I keep speaking in terms of systemic change.

Before we had Mapping Cancer Markers, the we had Fight AIDS at Home. It was the longest running and last of the original big projects. When it closed, and we risked losing anybody who selected it (or all prior projects) but opted out of "add me automatically to new projects," we risked losing an entire population of active participants who weren't paying close attention to their BOINC notifications.

At the time I recommended ''accidentally'' flagging those people's accounts with "if no projects are available, send me work from other projects." It wasn't a popular idea at the time, and we ended up losing a whole bunch of crunching power in the dropoff.

Going forward, it might be a good idea for the admins to have people register their mailing addresses. I'm sure it's worth the cost of postage to notify a major donor that their queue has gone dry.

Raspberry Pi toys are not responsible for the problem.

It's the 3.8 million global deaths from COVID that have people concerned.
We can hardly blame them. I'd like to see more total throughput, but if we're capped on batches per day, let's use people's enthusiasm effectively.