But the work shouldn't be completely lost--if you have already written out five structures when you turn off your computer off, the next time you turn it on it should only have to make five more (I need to check on this).

I'm aware of that. The issue is that, especially on the longer WUs, each of these structures can take a long time to do, so a lot of calculations are wasted when computers are switched off.

It is midnight here and I'm about to switch the computers off. One of them is showing 1% complete after 26 minutes crunching (on an Athlon XP 3000+, a reasonably quick machine). Unless it advances to 10% in the next few minutes, that half hour of crunching will be wasted as we go back to zero in the morning.
With a slow machine (say the minimum, 500MHz PC), the steps could be hours apart.

Most other projects are able to show more even progress and save more often. I'd like to see Rosetta do that too, if at all possible.

hibernating the pc would be a temporary work around where possible (although not ideal in many situations, i know)

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does rosetta allocate work units on expected ram/cpu useage? if not, would it be practical to implement an allocation system based on the system's capacity?

We would very much like to be able to do this, but it doesn't seem that the BOINC infrastructure allows this.

It seams strange to me that the BOINC infrastructure wouldnÕt allow for this. If I remember correctly Predictor is sending out work depending on what processor type/operating system the host have. Einstein is sending out results that work on the big data set you already have, if there is work available for it. So could you explain the problem and someone may have an idŽe for a workaround. In theory dividing hosts according to speed and ram would be a simple matter. It would only be a matter of looking at the values for Memory and floating point speed/integer speed and decide on a dividing value. Divide the work in 4 or more groups and give work to each host according to what group it belongs to. But that is in theory, and reality is usual not that simple.

I was wondering about this as well, and remember reading that this was entirely possible, and that boinc does it by default, i managed to find it, in SETI@home's transition to BOINC, in the last bullet point under "Why is SETI@home switching to BOINC?", under "Questions and answers" the following statement is made

BOINC distributes work based on host parameters. Work units requiring 512 MB of RAM, for example, will only be sent to hosts having at least that much RAM. This lets us use BOINC for a wider range of computations than the 'one size fits all' SETI@home Classic.

this seems pretty clear to me, maybe it's just a case of rosetta admins needing to set the correct parameters for workunits?

Thanks--we will work towards this over the next month or so. The "to do" list is pretty long right now!

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The "to do" list is pretty long right now!

is the "to-do" list available for us users to see (so that existing items aren't re-requested), if not, could it be posted as a NC forum sticky or normal page on the site
possibly with the occasional progress update?

many thanks

hibernating the pc would be a temporary work around where possible (although not ideal in many situations, i know)

Er, no.

Rosetta often/always crashes out on most boxes if you hibernate, whatever setting you have for keep in memory. Also so do other projects so this may be a BOINC issue rather than Rosetta. Don't try to hibernate when your CPDN long wu is just about to complete!!!

Suspend seems to work OK with BOINC & Rosetta, so long as keep in memory = yes.

Hmm I hibernated daily for some weeks some time ago and never had any problems...

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