11737 - benchmark? usefulness?

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alxbelu
Posts: 105
Joined: Sat Mar 14, 2020 6:28 pm

11737 - benchmark? usefulness?

Post by alxbelu »

Hi there, another coronavirus recruit (though I'm quite sure I was running F@H for a while back in 2003ish).

A couple of hours ago, my ancient desktop with an R9 290x got assigned a WU for 11737, which seems to be a benchmark; is it useful to run this? (Does it for e.g. produce any valuable performance metric?)

I've also got a newish laptop with an RTX2060 that seems to actually be getting normal/coronavirus-related WUs (albeit both ul & dl seem very slow atm), and I started assuming that the desktop/290x was simply too slow for anything important at the moment.

(I do realize that the more capable systems should be prioritized for important work, especially when there's actually a sudden influx of systems and consequently a lack of actual work to be done, so I'm not complaining, though if the benchmark does not produce anything valuable I'd rather not waste energy either :wink:)
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codecaine
Posts: 17
Joined: Sun Mar 15, 2020 1:35 am

Re: 11737 - benchmark? usefulness?

Post by codecaine »

Hi @alxbelu

I've also recently joined, but have been through some Work Units (WU) already, and also had the project you mention once. After a ton of reading I learned that FAH has been around for 20 years, and that the scientists as a group determine the priority for projects based on usefulness. It's quite interesting, and you can see some responses in this thread with more details viewtopic.php?f=16&t=32364. The project description is not extremely obvious on that particular project, but I'm sure that it's useful if it's prioritized.

Cheers,
JamieF
Posts: 10
Joined: Sat Mar 14, 2020 10:49 pm

Re: 11737 - benchmark? usefulness?

Post by JamieF »

A google search shows that there were $100 prizes for staff that do that WU, seems a bit strange to me haha
Joe_H
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Re: 11737 - benchmark? usefulness?

Post by Joe_H »

JamieF wrote:A google search shows that there were $100 prizes for staff that do that WU, seems a bit strange to me haha
And where exactly did you read that? I have not come across any such reward.
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