Howdy,

I see this setting in there and I can set it from 1 hour to 24 hours. What does this really do?

Does it mean that for each WU I will crunch it for that amount of time? If so, does it mean for anyone with the default (3) we are leaving all kinds of things not checked and could be hurting the project? If I set it to 24, does that mean I'm doing a more thorough check and am helping the cause more?

Just not sure what it really means when I change that setting as far as how it changes what I find in each WU and if it changes my credit gained.

Hope that makes sense.

Thanks.

---

The setting has no effect on the science. Each task here is composed of multiple searchs starting from a (semi-)random number. The target runtime just sets how many of those starting points you begin from. It will always perform at least one full search so if you set it too low it will run long enough to finish the first one.

---

BOINC WIKI

BOINCing since 2002/12/8

The setting has no effect on the science. Each task here is composed of multiple searchs starting from a (semi-)random number. The target runtime just sets how many of those starting points you begin from. It will always perform at least one full search so if you set it too low it will run long enough to finish the first one.

So if I only crank something for 3 hours and send it back, it may send the same WU to someone else to do more testing where I left off? But if I test for 24 hours, there might not be anything left to test (or might be depending on my PC).

If that's true, I guess that makes sense.

I'm just not sure why that's even an option then. They should set it to 24h by default and just let people change it down if they don't run it enough to get that done in the 10 days.

Ah well.

---

The setting has no effect on the science. Each task here is composed of multiple searchs starting from a (semi-)random number. The target runtime just sets how many of those starting points you begin from. It will always perform at least one full search so if you set it too low it will run long enough to finish the first one.

So if I only crank something for 3 hours and send it back, it may send the same WU to someone else to do more testing where I left off? But if I test for 24 hours, there might not be anything left to test (or might be depending on my PC).

If that's true, I guess that makes sense.

I'm just not sure why that's even an option then. They should set it to 24h by default and just let people change it down if they don't run it enough to get that done in the 10 days.

Ah well.

We're not doing exhaustive testing of all possible models - there's far more possible tests to run than we could run with 1000x the compute power available, so the models run are a random sample. There is a small chance that two computers will run the same model at some point, but that's not necessarily a bad thing either.

---