A thought on WU quota

This is probably covered in some other postings, but to sum it up again:

- The data files you download contain detector data from a frequency band that is half a Hertz wide. The frequency is contained in the filename, and the filename in turn is part of the name of the Workunits that require this file.

- The scheduler has a feature called "locality scheduling" to avoid unnecessary downloads, i.e. he will try to assign work to your host that only requires the files you already have. Thus you will get "work" for the same frequency band that is covered by the same file.

- The lower the frequency, the more coarse we can make the grid of the sky positions to cover the sky, i.e. the less calculations we have to do. In the higher frequencies we distribute the frequencies and sky positions between the Workunits so that they have more or less the same length. However this doesn't work anymore below a certain frequency, resulting in the shorter workunits there. The boundary is at about 300Hz, i.e. if the WU name has a number below 300, it's a short one.

- Currently the only way to get rid of the short WUs once you have one is to either just wait until all the WUs referring to that file are through, or to reset the project.

- In the next run we will also have 'long' and 'short' Workunits. To deal with that we plan to modify the scheduler so that it prefers to give the shorter WUs to the slowest machines.

BM