The clean energy project has a 12 hour limit on tasks. If the task finishes in less time, hooray. If the task is still running at 12 hours, the software stops it and the intermediate results are sent back to the scientists. The scientists are supposed to be able to tell whether the experiment is worth pursuing by looking at the intermediate results. No time was wasted.

Keep on crunchin'

Not going to happen. What the future upgrade of the science app brings we'll learn when it's beta time... as always, will likely come with hours notice in the Beta forums.

We are working on upgrading to a new version of QCHEM now and will make some changes to the workunits when that version is released.

However, for complex reasons that I encourage the Harvard researchers to describe fully (I would explain my understanding but I would likely introduce some misinformation), the information created by running one workunit for 24 hours is less valuable than running 2 workunits for 12 hours each. As a result, it is not necessarily in the interests of advancing the science behind the project for us to change that limit.

However, what Harvard has told us is that would advance their project is that they have some jobs that they will not currently send us and have been running on powerful grids. This is because they require more RAM, more CPU power, more IO and more bandwidth. However, we looked at the higher end devices connected to us and they could certainly run these jobs. When we role out the new version of QCHEM we plan to provide a mechanism for people to sign up to receive these challenging jobs and allow Harvard to run more of these high end jobs.

There's -no- regular interval between checkpoints of which there are a maximum of 16, of which #3 and #12 take the longest to reach... depending on device power from 3 to 6 hours, some devices don't even get to checkpoint #3 before the 12 hours cut-off is there.

It is recommended, strongly, to -not- allow multiple CEP2 tasks start at exactly the same moment. This so badly compounds IO bottle-necking, that even the first checkpoint/setup phase can take very long.

There's a checkpoint Start Here FAQ which discusses the particulars for all the different sciences at WCG. CEP2 is opt-in, not opt-out. A special configuration / recommendation page was compiled by the CEP2 scientists.

Switch time you don't have to change. All BOINC clients since about v6 do not switch project unless a checkpoint has been made. It is on the recommendation sheet to activate LAIM (Leave application in memory when suspended) when running CEP2, so when they are interrupted, they can resume from where they left off.

edit: Obviously, if BOINC is restarted [unloaded from memory] or the system booted, the task(s) resumes from last checkpoint.

I think I have data files setting in my Home file (Ubuntu) that need to be fetched. I am new to Ubuntu and WCG, so will need help. The files appear to be locked.