A "heads-up" announcement

[Bruce]

Vijay has announced that the hardware used to benchmark new projects (and assign points) will be changed shortly. This will mean some pretty significant changes in the relative value of Tinker and Gromacs. There have been lots of back-room discussions about the implications, but the this is the first real statement of direction on the subject.

Once FAH switches to the new points scheme, there will be lots of discussion about the new "best" settings for particular hardware.

[Bruce]

Most of the projects will now get more or about the same points. Generally speaking, Gromacs is about the same and Tinker is worth significantly more. This will probably put an end to the name "sTinker" that was given when everybody with SSE hardware got used to the bonus and accepted it as the norm.

It will take some time for new "best performance" recommendations to be formed. Certainly the recommendation that you never run a modern machine without "-advmethods" is probably obsolete. The closer your machine's architecture is to the 2.8MHz P4 used for benchmarking, the more likely you'll see a level playing field.

On the other hand, if you've got an older non-SSE machine, the Tinker WUs are now worth quite a bit more than the Gromacs WUs.

Overall, Windows runs on about 86% of the active machines in FAH. Within that 86%, the Pentium MMX represents about 0.1%, compared to about 35% for the P4. Certainly we'll hear less complaints from the older machines that we do from the newer ones.