Thanks for the updates Seippel and Knreed.

Great news! Yes, the points have been fun, but it's been great to see the sheer number of results that have passed through my system alone, let alone the daily results which flow system wide. It's great to know that together, we've given quite a punch to the gut of cancer. 2.5 years means a *lot* in this fight!

I can't wait to see what you have in the pipeline for us, GPU or CPU. Bring it!

I know this isn't likely but is there any chance we get a hint at the types of projects coming down the line? I am definitely not asking for a timeline (I know the sensitivities there) but before DFSL, SN2S, C4CW, and CFSW it was mentioned that there would be four projects that focused on clean water.

So what is WCG's policy now on handling new projects as far as estimated work load and the amount of time they estimate that we will have work to crunch? With GPU's speeding up research, a new project coming in that has GPU work would need significantly more work then one coming in with just CPU. Is there a bias there? Would it be smarter for a small project to just say CPU and then develop a GPU soon after? Just curious how WCG is pushing the GPU to new projects with this requirement in mind?

I think that most of the GPU projects are short of work. Certainly POEM is, and even GPUGrid barely manages to keep up, though I have had no problems recently. And there is no point in piling on if a project is short of work, since any work unit you get is simply taking it away from someone else. It might actually decrease the overall efficiency of the project by placing an unnecessary load on their servers.

The only exception I know of is Folding@home, which manages to generate tons of work, maybe because of the nature of the problem and lots of researchers, but also because of their infrastructure. With their new Core_17 coming out before long, the AMD cards will get a big boost, especially the higher-end 7000 series. So I think you had better be prepared to shift around and not expect any one project to keep you busy, and to buy new cards with an eye on what is required in a given area.

But note that one potential problem with Folding is that it usually does not like to deal with dissimilar cards if you run two or more, at least with the current cores (though Core_17 might be better). However at the moment I am running HCC on an AMD HD 7770, and also Folding on a GTX 560 Ti on the same PC, so it can occasionally work; it is hard to predict. BOINC does not seem to have that problem, and I have had no particular problems getting different cards to work on various BOINC projects.