Nothing is in itself important. It only becomes important when considered in the context of something else.

Badges are not important in ANY context, getting the research finished and getting cures out in the public domain as quickly as possible IS!



I dont want to be the only one that cant afford an i7 crunching on the i7 Community Grid.

There are plenty of people who can't afford an i7 and plenty of people who don't want one, they crunch with what they have because they want to help, not because of a coloured square.

I don't have an I7, I have a E520 Dell Dual Core and a Q9950 Quaddie


What is going to happen when they release a 16 core CPU with 64 threads?

Research will be finished that little bit quicker.



By the way, if you really want to throw your money at research, buy some GTX295s.

Who said anything about throwing money at research, I crunch with the systems I have, just like you. Yes I do intend to purchase an i7 in the near to medium future, but that is primarily for non crunching reasons, the side effect of that will be that I will be able to crunch more research and quicker.

And yet again we landed on GPU computing, assumptions of implementability and applicability to WCG sciences and postulate. "So just using the correct type of graphics card can hugely improve your research input." Using the 'correct' type is for those that happen to have the correct type and if they haven't requires them to speculate of what will become mainstream and lay out money. If you have money to burn, do so, but heed the warning by Movieman. He burned a few and your PC will go pitch dark without a functioning card. Most certainly that's not what WCG wants anyone to venture into without absolute and total awareness, default as I understand it for WCG will be OFF if it comes to this grid.

Throwing muck? Really skgiven whatever you wish to read into what I said, anyone wanting to ride their hardware anywhere is most welcome.

Well said, they aren't important only to the degree that WE make them important or people view badges as an indication of what we have individuals have contributed to this project and in all those factors they fail.
All they are is pretty little colored squares that show you've worked on a particular project.

My point in answering skygiven in my previous post was to show that his comment of using HT just gave a "13%" increase while inferring that the user got a 100% increase in shown core time as is used in the badges.
That simply isn't true.
When I first got a nehalem i7-965 I tested and posted my results as I listed in the previous post.
You do 8 WU of HCC with HT off it takes 5 hours give or take a couple minutes.
You do the same 8WU with HT on and it takes app 4.5 hours.
There is no cheating or taking advantage of the system here. All thats being done is to assess the equipment and use it to it's utmost.
It's doing the same work whether HT is on or off, just doing it faster with HT turned on.

Edit:
I just sat down to think on what skygiven was trying to get across and I have to admit that I'd missed his point.
His point is all about core time as effects badges and i'm quilty of tunnel vision as all I look at is getting the most work done in the fastest or shortest timeframe.
His issue:
I do those above mentioned 8 HCC work units with HT turned off in 5 hours and I am "granted" app 20 core hours of time(4x5 hours) on the project.
I do those same 8 HCC WU with HT turned on in 4.5 hours and I am granted 36 core hours of time(8x4.5 hours)
NOW I see his point and in this he is 100% correct.
I stand corrected and I do apologise for not seeing this before.
Now we come to the issue of what to do about it.
Do we, the people with machines turn off HT to equalise the playing field between machines with Ht and those that don't have it or do we continue to use our machines in the most efficient way possible even though they do skew the time factors on the badges?
I know the answer for myself is to keep HT running as it does more work in a shorter timeframe and isn't the purpose of why we are all here is to get the work done as quickly as possible and the completed data back into the hands of the researchers so that they can make use of it?
You folks think on this because if we are here for any other reason then something is terribly wrong.

The way I see it is this: The researchers have broken down the projects into little bite sized pieces we call work units. We're here to process each of these work units. In whatever way our hardware can process each work unit the best, is the way in which we can best help them in their research.

When you have finished processing one of these WU's, 3 different measurements are taken. One being how long it took to process said WU, two being the points claimed/granted, and the third being that the number of WU's processed is increased by 1.

The points are counted towards one's current ranking. The time it took is counted towards the badges. And the number of WU's processed is tallied in the number of results returned.

To base the badges on time is probably the "fairest" way to go. This gives the opportunity for the slower computers to have their contribution counted equally with the faster computers.