LHC@home

Since the work in this project is generated in a different way compared to forinstance SETI-II, I think it is possible to have a somewhat different way of distributing wu's.

To my understanding LHC:
- sends out a batch of wu's
- wait for the result from all the wu's
- the scientists evaluate the results
- and then a new batch is generated based on the previous result and sent out.

If it's important for this project to have the work finished in a timely manner. I would suggest to change the way wu's are sent out.

The estimated time to complete all the wu's can be used to have a treshold after which the maximum number of wu's sent to each cruncher is decreased. Until at the very end only 1 wu is sent to each cruncher.

With this max cap the complete project is finished in shortest time possible when the last wu's for this round is sent out. In the best scenario within one day after the last wu is sent out.

An example: 100'000 wu's are generated and crunchers start download wu's with theirs individual setting on cache size etc. Some dl 1 wu others dl more. When the wu's are starting to dwindle and the treshold is reached the crunchers that usually dl a lot of wu's gets a little less. This is repeated until at the end when there are as many wu's left as there are crunchers every one only gets one wu. The end result is that when the last wu is dl'd there is only one wu in every cruncher and they should return within the slowest crunchers crunch-time, perhaps within one day.

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Whereas this is a great idea in a utopian computer world, your model doesn't take into consideration "long latency" users such as those on laptops, dial up modems or internet connections that may only be on the scale of once a week, or PCs with low activity %.

Your idea would work best for people who have BOINC running 24/7 with 80% availability or higher and an average turnaround time of .9 days or less. Where such criteria would meet a certain number of users attached to LHC, the majority do not. For example my work cache is set to 3 days and my average turnaround time is 1.5 days; my pc is on 98.4% of the time, crunches 95.4% of that time, and LHC@Home gets 87.5% of that. I wouldn't meet your criteria despite having high availability because of the work cache and turnaround time.

I'm sure if the LHC@Home staff wanted to create a "special purpose" set of WUs for those who meet such measurable criteria they could. It would be a matter of demand on the science staff's part and implementation in the scheduler. I can't speak for LHC@Home and IMHO this won't be happening anytime soon. Besides, the "Average Turnaround Time" on LHC@Home has been broken for ages, it still says 13.89 days and has for several months now.. so more to fix before they could implement. ;)

Happy Crunching!

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