bump for replies. is anyone else concerned about the possible number of 256MB RAM machines that may drop out?

We set the minimum system requirements higher (250MB RAM and 550Mhz CPU) for the new project because of its considerably larger memory requirement. If we set it lower, your machine is very likely to have insufficient virtual memory limit and this could cause the agent to repeatedly crash and in some cases even cause other applications on your machine to crash. Furthermore, even if you have a sufficiently high virtual memory limit, your machine is still likely to suffer from extra paging activity which would substantially slow down processing for all applications. Thus we set this limit higher to be as unobtrusive as possible. Even with this setting some users might notice some minor effects, but we tried to balance this against having even higher system requirement.

In addition, because the checkpointing intervals can be rather long on slow machines (and much longer on machines slowed down by potential paging if memory were limited), this can lead to considerable delays in completing a work unit, especially when the machine is shut down regularly. Therefore, we have set the minimum CPU higher for this project as well. We will attempt to modify the research program to checkpoint more frequently and to use less memory. In that event, we may be able to lower the minimum system requirements. We are sorry for any frustration some members may have over this. In the meantime, you can still contribute to the Human Proteome Folding project and its monumental progress.

We studied the statistics of how many of our machines would not qualify with the above limits for FightAIDS@home and the fraction is less than about 8%. We still need machines to work on Human Proteome Folding and these machines can continue to be a valuable service for that.