Project completion percentage

[reavy]

Do the individual projects have a notion of overall progress? For example, it would be interesting to see a % complete figure for each of the projects listed on the Project Summary page http://fah-web.stanford.edu/psummary.html. Obviously individual work units have a notion of completion percentage.

[bruce]

This has been requested before. Fundamentally, completion is something of a moving target. While the scientist in charge of the project has to estimated how long each trajectory must run and how many trajectories it takes to gather enough data, they're just estimates. The data has to be studied to see if it's actually enough and often-times the project must be extended. Other times, enough data is gathered to discover that a slight changes in the initial configurarion would produce more/better data so a derivative project is initiated.

That's the thing about science. You don't always immediately discover what you set out to discover.

[reavy]

Thanks for the info, Bruce. I'm surprised but pleased to learn that the intermediate results are useful while the project is still running.