I have been running Seti and have just upgraded to BOINC 4.5. I added a Seti and the Climate Prediction to the project list. However when BOINC went off and got the data to process it downloaded 4 'projects' for Seti and 2 for Climate Prediction. This means that it takes a lot longer to complete the processes. Is this normal?
If I delete some of the processes will further ones be downloaded?

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The original "Classic" SETI program downloaded one work unit at a time, and uploaded it when it was done. Many third-party utilities came along to allow the downloading of multiple work units so if there was some network problem, or the SETI servers were down, or out of work, your computer could continue to work through the outage. BOINC has that functionality built in. The number of work units for each project that will be downloaded is controlled by the "connect to network every x days" setting in the preferences; if this is something very small, like 0.01, you will get one work unit at a time. If this is something very large, you will get a flood...

BOINC Manager is designed to shuffle your work units so that you never miss a deadline (unless the estimated times for a work unit are off and your queue very large). The actual number that can be handled depends on the speed of the machine; my fastest machine will keep two or three Einstein and a half-dozen SETI WUs around - my slowest, one of each - with the same 0.1 day setting.

There is no need to delete any of your work units, and yes, if you did, it would just download more. However... it _IS_ a little odd to see more than one CPDN WU at a time. If, when the deadline for these is approaching, the second one hasn't even started yet, I would abort that one.

For the detailed "owners manual", there is a Wiki: http://boinc-doc.net/boinc-wiki/

Welcome to BOINC!

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If you look at the CPDN work units you should see that they have nearly a one year deadline. So, it is not likely that you will not be able to complete them. The better news is that you will still get credit, and you will get credit "trickles" 72 times during the processing.

You can, as Bill suggested, read more on the projects and the BOINC Application in the Wiki. We add new material all the time, revise, extend, correct, and just generally have fun trying to help you out.

I "scan" the Number crunching fora of most projects and you can also ask questions by e-mail. But, in many cases I am going to point you to the Wiki where you can find the definitions and details of just about everything I can find.

But, suggestions are welcome, especially from people new to BOINC ... I just added a page to try to help the new folk on how to use the Wiki ... unfortunately it also says you have to do a little homework (Ugh!) ... :)

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