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DOCUMENTATION DISCUSSIONS FILE ROOM
Couple Questions

Couple Questions

 
ID: 63744
Posts: 3

First, the quick question. Is there any point to points(no pun intended)? Is it just to give you a rough estimate of what you're doing or make you feel good about yourself? If so, why are they not consistant(I.E. My first two days of using Grid I racked up maybe 600 points from various grids, and after adding the PS3 grid, I accumulated 19k points in 11 hours)

Secondly, Is there a way to(or plans in the future to incorporate) control your resources given to each grid? At the moment I have my friends PS3, my laptop and my desktop all running at the same time, the problem is, my desktop is a beast, and I use it quite frequently. While I more than happy simply letting the PS3 and laptop idle and work, I'd be bored out of my mind without my desktop. What I find though, is long projects that I feel bad intterupting before they finish. Its not ussually a problem unless the deadline is extremely close. I can't help but feel however, that this 6 hour project thats due tommorrow, could be completed in much less time if I could assign all my cores too completing it, or some such other nonsense. It also disturbs me when a project I've aborted 20 times for not progressing comes back to haunt me, seconds before the completion of a working project. The short question I suppose is, are there any plans to add the ability for user input? After all, there is an advantage to the intelligent human mind, especially one that knows when he's coming back and going to stop the process.

ID: 21503
Posts: 326

So, for better or worse, points are only a measure of your contributions; there is nothing at present that one can do with them.
 
Points will vary for a variety of reasons: first, they are "lumpy": you get points in batches.  This is because points are awarded after you finish a work unit,  and after your work is "validated" by the project.  this later part can take a few days.  SO you'll see big chunks appearing every so often, rather than a steady increase day by day.  (If your system availability is consistent, this should be pretty reliable on a month-to-month basis; just not on a day-to-day basis.
Also: points are a measure of actual computing work completed, not of clock hours.  So a faster machine will get more points per hour than a slower one.  As it turns out, for some applications, a PS3 can do as much work as 10 or 20 ordinary PCs -- this can happen for projects that are well suited to exploit the graphics processing hardware in the game console.  For other projects, the PS3 might have no real edge; or the project won't run at all on PS3. 
ID: 21503
Posts: 326

At the moment, you can edit the "resource share" on all your machines or individual machines -- and this will determine how the devices allocate time among your projects.  ie, you can make a device spend more time on some projects, and less on others if you want.

having said that, we don't at the moment have tools to manage specific jobs (apart from the options available within the desktop software: primarily to suspend all other tasks on a machine as a way to force focus on a single job).  --

But this omission is really by design: that is, we've tried to make participation as easy as possible, and providing means to manage participation at that low a level would come at the cost of consideable additional complication to the user interface.  So for now we've opted to keep it simple in the hopes of drawing in more people...  The wisdom of this is, perhaps, to be determined.

Thanks very much for your interest and support. 

ID: 63744
Posts: 3

Well, what you could do is similarly to a game manufactuer... hide everything behind an "Show Advanced Options" Checkbox of some sort. But thats really a matter of taste.
ID: 21503
Posts: 326

For beter of worse, that's been on the to-do list, but low enough that it always seems to get bumped by other priorities.  Sorry about that.
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