I will admit when I first started crunching I was a little stir crazy, I didn't quite find my "calling" yet so to speak. In fact for someone viewing my stats, it looks like I crunched a little of almost everything for awhile, and I admit it certainly felt that way. While being a mathematician, at first I felt I should crunch mathematics based projects, but upon a bit of an epiphany I realized, I am already devoting so much of my efforts to math outside of my distributed computing efforts, I realized I wanted to seek out ways to contribute to other branches of science or medicine in a way that would likely not happen with mathematics ( or at least no where near as quickly with mathematics).
Once I really started to pin down projects I wanted to work on, I realized it was time to learn a bit more of what is going on behind the scenes at these projects. As such the forums are the best place to turn. I have had a great time reading and participating to what limited extent I can in both the World Community Grid Forum, and the GPU Grid forum.
It is honestly incredible what we can learn from others, such as on the GPU grid forum, I have learned a decent bit about the construction of video cards, and how you can trouble shoot cards in various fashions. In fact I have not tried this myself yet, but I have found out with a minimal performance hit, reducing the clock speed on parts of your GPU cards memory, can save you slightly on the energy consumption of your machine.
These sorts of tips are great to learn, while I am not sure if I am going to try reducing the clock speed on my GPUs memory, because I sort of have a mentality if its not broke don't fix it, and from people posting the results of their energy consumption, and it seems the energy benefits might not quite be enough to make it worth it, i.e same % reduction in energy use, as % hit to computing power.
Either way forums offer great tips, and are a way to tap all sorts of knowledge from such a wide variety of people.
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