Upcoming changes to bigadv threshold

[kasson]

We have a policy of periodically re-evaluating the bigadv program, including the threshold required to run bigadv projects.
It is the intent of bigadv to match large and resource-intensive work units with some of the most powerful machines used by FAH donors. This "most powerful" line naturally advances with computing power. To date, bigadv has been a CPU-based program, and with increasing numbers of CPU cores and power of those cores, we have decided to lay out a roadmap of bigadv threshold changes for the next several months.

Feb 17 (two months from today): bigadv threshold will become 24 cores
Apr 17 (four months from today): bigadv threshold will become 32 cores

We want to give advance notice of these changes, and we recognize that change is not always welcome or comfortable. We should also emphasize that the science performed by donor machines is valuable in all parts of the FAH project, and part of the change in bigadv threshold is because we would like to encourage moderately powerful machines to help boost the capabilities of non-bigadv SMP projects where we do a lot of this science.

We also recognize that core count is not the most robust metric of machine capability, but given our current infrastructure it is the most straightforward surrogate to evaluate.

Thank you once again for your generous participation in the Folding@Home project!