Bosw8er

Some people may have experienced a lower score then normal the last weeks. Here's the explanation

On the points issue:

There are primarily two types of work units that your computer can download: Gromacs and Tinkers. The Gromacs units are relatively recent and everybody loves them because you can crunch them faster and your points thus accumulate faster. As recently as two months ago, these didn't exist and we all did Tinkers. At any given time now, there are usually both Tinkers and Gromacs units available, but the proportion changes. Currently, there are temporarily more Tinkers than Gromacs but this is trending back. There are more Tinkers for a couple of reasons. First, some interesting scientific data was encountered in some ofthe Tinker units and they are being developed more fully. Consequently more Tinkers for the time being. Its likely that in the future we'll experience the opposite - More Gromacs for period when interesting results occur there. Tinkers, while slower, are in some cases the only way to get at some scientic results - so they will probably always be with us, athough I suspect in relatively fewer numbers. Where possible, it seems that the Pande Group also prefers Gromacs because they get more results more quickly. The slowdown in points due to more Tinker WUs affects all of us, not just you or your team and as Vijay pointed out, the normal ebb and flow of the ratio of one type of WU to another is alreay trending in the other direction. There is no reliable way for you or me to choose one type of work unit over another. This element of chance (for me) does add some interest and excitement to the process. Unfortuantely it sometimes also distresses some contributors who don't have a bit longer perspective on things (I've only been around three months, so there's still plenty for me to experience!)

About uploading results:

During the past week or ten days, the Pande Group has been moving to a new facility so there has been some temporary inconveniences in getting result back to the servers. They have also had more than their share of hard drive failures, etc. In another post, we found out that they are replacing the drives with more reliable ones as problems are encountered. When you can't upload, here are some strategies. First, you could just do nothing - the client on your computer will try every 6 hours to upload any finished result. Second, you could go to the server status page to make sure the server is up (the link can be found at the top of this page - its the last one). If the server is up and you would like to upload immediately (and I have to admit, I'm sometimes impatient and want to do this) all you need do is shut down the program and restart it. At the beginning of "turn on" the program sees if any finished results are ready to transmit and attempts to send them.

Hope I have helped you.

Best,

Ron

NOW GET BACK TO WORK !