Hey guys I found this site by chance and I am interested in contributing to @home projects. Only problem is I have a slow laptop, it took me 20,000 seconds to complete 1 task last night with the cpu at 50% or so. I was browsing around the statistics and checking out other peoples computers and I saw a lot of people completing similar tasks here in 70 seconds or less sometimes. Makes me look like an old dinosaur. Should I even bother?

(...) I have a slow laptop, it took me 20,000 seconds to complete 1 task last night with the cpu at 50% or so. I was browsing around the statistics and checking out other peoples computers and I saw a lot of people completing similar tasks here in 70 seconds or less sometimes. Makes me look like an old dinosaur. Should I even bother?

Well, IMO it does not matter how much work you do, work unit done on the fastest GPU is the same valuable for the project as one done by an old CPU, as long as it's valid.

I have myself an old AthlonXP 2000+ on SETI, makes about 220 credits a day running 24/7, not much compared to any modern CPU or specially GPU. But, with 112,131 Seti credits ATM, this machine has contributed to the project more than many other modern computers.

However, if you don't like to "look like an old dinosaur" (although your Core 2 Duo should be faster than any CPU I have), you could participate in CPU-only projects, there are many of them and also try to find a project for your GPU, even if with just 256MB RAM it might be little difficult, Collatz should work I *think*. If you don't run into heat problems, you could also use 100% CPU.

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Hey guys I found this site by chance and I am interested in contributing to @home projects. Only problem is I have a slow laptop, it took me 20,000 seconds to complete 1 task last night with the cpu at 50% or so. I was browsing around the statistics and checking out other peoples computers and I saw a lot of people completing similar tasks here in 70 seconds or less sometimes. Makes me look like an old dinosaur. Should I even bother?

I will add to this...do you play the lottery? I mean do you buy a lottery ticket? Some people do and they always think THEIR ticket will be the winning one, it is similar with Boinc and the projects and their workunits. My pc may do 10 bazillion workunits per day, while your pc may take two days to finish just one. But if the one you are working on is the ONE unit that has the answer to the problem it IS a good thing!! Maybe it took my 10 bazillion junk units to get to your ONE good unit, no one knows which unit has the answer to the question, that is why we crunch them all!! Just like no one knows which lottery ticket is the winner until it is over!

Now if it were me I would find a project that I could contribute more than 1 unit every 100 years, but that is entirely up to you. Here is a link to all the Distributed Computing Projects that are active right now:
http://www.distributedcomputing.info/projects.html

The Boinc ones are noted but scroll down, it is a long list! Good luck finding one that appeals to YOU, some will and some won't. ALL of them would be happy to get your additional crunching power for their project!

What ever you choose, welcome to the world of crunching and thank you for helping out mankind.

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http://www.AI4FR.com

Let's add a little.. perspective to the enthusiasm ;)

Contributing is great and such. However, going with Mikeys example of 10 bazillion workunits per day versus 0.5 an interesting question arises: what if your single WU was the all important one.. and you don't crunch it? What happens? Simple: the next PC asking for a WU gets it and now this one will discover the big bang. It's not that the discovery will not be made, it just takes longer.

And if many people choose not to contribute, at some point it will take so much longer to crunch through WUs that the all-important one will not even be issued to anyone.

So what you want to do is not "contribute somewhere, no matter how small". It's "contribute efficiently, donate where it counts". With Milkyway the situation is special in that we've got "separation" workunits, which can be run on GPUs or CPU. The GPUs are far far better at this stuff, that's why your CPU is looking ancient. On the other hand, if you run something which can not currently be done by GPUs, then your CPU is not that old and slow. At Milkyway you could run "nbody" workunits.

To do this go to "your account/Milkyway@Home settings" and disable "Milkyway@Home", but leave "MilkyWay@Home N-Body Simulation" enabled. Or any other projects which can only use CPUs.

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002