Times (Elapsed / CPU) for BRP5/6/6-Beta on various CPU/GPU combos - DISCUSSION Thread

The ease of dealing with data collection and the level of pain you will suffer is likely to vary widely from person to person. My formal education was in the sixties and early seventies and PCs (and Microsoft) didn't exist then. I grew up with mainframes and later departmental workstations/servers in a University environment and grew to really dig the Unix way of doing things - eg Vi for editing and Troff for document processing. By the time Microsoft had started to dominate, I was in the fortunate position of being able to delegate word processing type tasks to underlings. I know what the screen images look like but I've never really 'used' any Microsoft Office component.

I wrote a lot of documentation of all types but I always preferred to use Unix/Troff if I had to do it myself. I had good staff who could do things that needed MS Office so I just kept using Unix tools for technical documentation I needed, right up to the point I retired. In the last few years of my working life, my business had Windows and FreeBSD machines - you can probably guess who was using which :-). Just after retirement, I switched to Linux and have been extremely happy ever since. I've never had a good reason to use any of the free office suites that come with Linux. I know where they are in the repos but I've never installed one.

These days I have access to a bunch of iMacs, courtesy of my daughters business. The one I've 'comandeered' recently had a hard disk failure so I worked out how to open it up and replace the hard drive. I set up a live USB external drive with the latest OS X Yosemite and have used it to do upgrades on other machines in the office and a fresh install on the one with the new hard drive. Sure beats 5GB downloads on each machine. I have now this morning installed LibreOffice on it and have actually found the 'Import from the Web' function you talked about. So I'm sitting here looking at a spreadsheet with several imported pages of Einstein results, headings and all, all nicely lined up into rows and columns but without much of a clue as to what to do next :-). I vaguely remember that you can process numbers in colums by creating formulae or using functions and so by clicking on a thing called "function wizard" and doing a bit of judicious reading of the help combined with a generous dollop of trial and error (mainly error), I've now actually managed to get reasonable looking values for MIN(), MAX(), AVERAGE(), STDEV(), and VAR() calculated and stored in the cells immediately below the two particular columns we are interested in. Of course, I am assuming that these actually are the right functions and they are smart enough to ignore non numeric stuff like headings, etc. and double dashes in the columns for 'in progress' results, but at least nothing seemed to complain :-). As Dr Mike would say in his own inimitable style - WHOOPITY GOLF CLAP!!!!

So a big thanks go to Gord for shaming me into dipping my toe into the libreoffice pond. The first host only took about 6 hours to process and finally come up with the numbers for 107 data points. I'll add this new host to my list shortly. Now that I have some idea about what I'm doing, maybe the next one will have a chance of actually beating my manual method, particularly as the sample sizes are going to grow progressively day by day and the manual method will become a bit tedious :-).

EDIT: Host 05 now posted in Results thread. I decided the way I was presenting the mean values away from the corresponding standard deviation and variance values was sub-optimal and confusing. So I restructured the template (just for the final host) and I think it looks better now. I'm sorry if this causes any inconvenience for anyone. If there are no cries of anguish, I'll probably go back and fix the first 4 hosts as well.

I've added an improved template with placeholder strings containing suggestions of what information to provide, in the opening post of the RESULTS thread. There are a set of step by step instructions on how to use the template. If you care to browse the opening post, you should get a good idea of what I've done. Please feel free to offer criticisms/suggestions for improvement if you see something you don't like.

I've also added HOST 06 to the bottom of the list.