Since we have a few strike team (or new name TBD) members heading off over the weekend, I thought I'd get a strategy discussion started now.  That way, they can get an early start if we've got enough figured out by then.   In general I'd like to get started this weekend and finish before March Madness folding.  It might be nice to make a top 50 DC Vault standing our goal.
The general concept is to make a concerted attack on our DC Vault standings by spreading our members across the projects where we have a low score.  In a nutshell, the DC Vault score for a project is your team's percentile rank times 100.  Thus, our folding@home team, at the 99.999th percentile, gets a score of 10,000.  If we have a team around 75th place out of 100, that's worth 2500 points.  What I noticed in several projects is that the lower half or even more of teams have pretty low scores; from there on up it gets a lot harder.  As an example, I was able to get our SIMAP team up to 7500 points running 2 systems for 2 weeks.
So, here's a list of projects where we are in the lowest 75 percent.  The ones in bold look like good targets; strikethrough ones may have "issues"; "???" means I don't know enough.  I would appreciate feedback from experts on the various projects, and also volunteers to lead the assault on each project (meaning help people out with setup instructions etc).  I'll try to keep this thread updated with everyone's feedback.  When we get the list firmed up, I hope people will volunteer for various projects so we can get good coverage.  I know most people, including me, picked Biological/Medical for their preference, but I am happy to explore outside of that  area for our "expeditions".
Physical Science
Cosmology@Home - currently having issues with the servers, and DC Vault isn't listing  the right team yet
Leiden Classic - 4338 points - pumps out cpu tasks worth ~30 credits that take 1-2 hours
Muon1 Particle Accelerator Design - 3561 points - non-BOINC, manual setup but not difficult
QMC@Home - 4820 points - ???
Biological and Medical Science
Malariacontrol.net - 7129 points - 1-2 hr CPU tasks - good chance of moving into top 20% in a week with more than one person running
Poem@Home - 3969 points - we are already cranking this one up
RNA World @ Home - 7103 points - CPU tasks that take at least 2 hours and sometimes over 5 days
The Lattice Project - 4237 points - BOINC project, first unit I got will take 72 hours, uses 800MB memory for 1
Mathematical
Collatz Conjecture - 5233 points - ATI GPU preferred
Enigma@Home - 4401 points - works on decoding the enigma machines and stuff.... Fairly quick wus, RHMash's 920 goes about 50 min to an hour....
GIMPS - 0 points - non-BOINC, manual setup, can take 2 weeks to complete 1 prime
NFS@Home - 5510 points - CPU tasks, 45 min to 1hr15min to complete
OGR-72 - 1287 points - non-BOINC, but fairly flexible and powerful client
Prime Sierpinski Problem - 2414 points - non-BOINC prime number finder - Pumps out CPU (first pass) task worth ~7500 credits takes 3 to 4 days to complete while its CPU (double check) task worth ~1500 credits takes ~a day to complete. This is a non-BOINC project and it's quite confusing to configure
RC5-72 - 6663 points - use only AMD GPUs - Pumps out GPU task worth ~1500 credits per server communication and takes ~2 hrs 15mins to complete. This is a non-BOINC project and quite easy to install. There is a BOINC Moo! Wrapper for this project that is not optimized whereby its GPU Usage % is much lower.
Wieferich@Home - skip this one, it's about to be removed from DC Vault
Miscellaneous
Majestic-12 - 2142 points - this one uses a LOT of internet bandwidth, not much CPU. Yes, indeed it is at least 1Mbit bandwidth running 24/7 for a day to crawl half a million URLs. This is a non-BOINC project and easy to install manually
SZTAKI Desktop Grid - 6195 points - ???
 
 
 
 

Enigma works on decoding the enigma machines and stuff.... Fairly quick wus, my 920 goes about 50 min to an hour.... Ive been doing it for a few days now alongnwith a few others to boost it up some....

Sztaki, low points per unit.... Haven't done one in awhile though.... I want to say intakes awhile for verification also....

I'll post more soon....
 
Edit:  QMC estimates about a 24 hour run time for me, but it drops to being about 9 hours....
Sztaki estimates about 2 hours....  Both are BOINC also....

Don't know why it double posted....  Both are BOINC projects....
 
Hopefully it makes things easier for the BOINC projects at least, http://allprojectstats.com/showteam.php?projekt=0&id=1588163 it shows how many members are crunching each project....  I would assume those with only one or two members would see a quicker increase in ranking with even just an extra person crunching....
 
And also, http://www.dc-vault.com/projects.php wihtout looking at our current rankings and point gaps between ranks, I would assume those with fewer teams would see a bigger DCV increase for position changes....  On a side note, though, I notice a big jump in our SETI ranking once in awhile with so many teams there, a few points will cause that....
 
On a side note, going back to the single member projects, Unless someone else has joined, I've been running Dimes on two systems, but only one recently, and it has gotten us to where we are currently....  
 
Not looking at individual projects, overall, I think we would see a bigger placement increase from Physical and Biological/Medical Sciences than the Math and Misc projects....  http://www.dc-vault.com/showscores.php
Look at the teams around 10 spots ahead of us in all of the categories, the points difference is closer in the two I pointed out above, mainly because we're ranked lower in those categories....  As much as I like the Math projects, I think we would see more of an improvement in physical and biological/medical sciences....  Running at least one from the other two wouldn't hurt, either, give people some variety....

Muon1 is also available under Yoyo@Home. Yoyo uses wrappers for those smaller projects out there to give them more support. I am also running another project under Yoyo called Harminous Trees. I'll see what I can do to run some additional projects in the list. One of my main i7 BOINC rigs will be going offline because I am giving it over to my mom to help her build a better system. I plan to replace this particular system with a 3930K as soon as the processors are available again but that might take a couple weeks.

I can switch one or two GPUs to Collatz. For anyone with ATI cards, Collatz really benefits from these cards due to the use of double precision math. 
 
I used to run QMC and The Lattice Project years ago. I'll try and fire those up somewhere. Also, I can enable Muon1 again in Yoyo.

True, I'd witnessed a highend AMD ATI gc done 15 - 16 mins per task that a NVIDIA GTX580 took 25mins for Collatz Conjecture project.

One thing I just noticed about Collatz is that my GTX 580 GPU load is 50-60%. With an app_info.xml it should be possible to run two at once to better utilize the GPU. I'll see if I can put one together in the next couple days when I have some more time.

OK, went ahead and started crunching on Malariacontrol.net
On a non oced 970 the "Run openMalaria A" tasks take between 1-2h.
These are all I got so far
 
edit: first task completed and validated: ~1h 20 min runtime and 19 pts awarded

In POEM
Our team is ranked 533 (Top 45.2%) has a total of 29,889 credits.
A top 10% team ranked 117 has a total of 1,320,781 credits while another top 20% team ranked 234 has a total of 311,326 credits.
 
In Collatz Conjecture
Our team is ranked 594 (Top 47.7%) has a total of 1,876,300 credits.
A top 10% team ranked 124 has a total of 77,383,305 credits while another top 20% team ranked 248 has a total of 16,486,303 credits.
 
In RNA World
Our team is ranked 116 (Top 28.7%) has a total of 76,944 credits.
A top 10% team ranked 40 has a total of 1,236,786 credits while another top 20% team ranked 80 has a total of 172,079 credits.
 
In MalariaControl.net
Our team is ranked 587 (Top 28.7%)  has a total of 76,933 credits.
A top 10% team ranked 204 has a total of 503,933 credits while another top 20% team ranked 408 has a total of 155,068 credits.

I will be glad and help out where needed.  I have 2 7970's that I have been mashing out driver problems with.  If someone would like to point me in the direction I can best help the team, I will start tomorrow running whichever project I need to.

Johnny_Utah

I will be glad and help out where needed.  I have 2 7970's that I have been mashing out driver problems with.  If someone would like to point me in the direction I can best help the team, I will start tomorrow running whichever project I need to.

Johnny_Utah, I've written something for you to consider, see your "Crunching on AMD cards" thread.

MOBAJOBG

Johnny_Utah

I will be glad and help out where needed.  I have 2 7970's that I have been mashing out driver problems with.  If someone would like to point me in the direction I can best help the team, I will start tomorrow running whichever project I need to.

Johnny_Utah, I've written something for you to consider, see your "Crunching on AMD cards" thread.

 
Thank you!  I will check it out now.

I just have a question.  Is "Plundering the DC Vault" the same thing as the DC Strike Team?  I may have mistakenly envisioned that our Team was going to agree upon a particular Project to attack and then go after it en masse.  From what I've read above it seems we may be going in various directions/projects at once and that is OK...I'm just trying to understand the thing(s) we are doing better.

like your thinking there MOBAJOBG
 
Right now its just about finding out which one(s) to attack first

texinga

I just have a question.  Is "Plundering the DC Vault" the same thing as the DC Strike Team?  I may have mistakenly envisioned that our Team was going to agree upon a particular Project to attack and then go after it en masse.  From what I've read above it seems we may be going in various directions/projects at once and that is OK...I'm just trying to understand the thing(s) we are doing better.

Yes, yes, yes and yes.  The strike team / strike force is attacking the DC Vault as a whole.  Yes, we did agree, in that 22 of the 22 that voted for a name also voted for this.  Yes, for this effort we are going at multiple projects at once, as a concerted effort to plunder the vault. 
I'm sure most efforts in the future will be directed at a single project, as were the previous ones (Christmas Challenge and PrimeGrid Year of the Dragon) but in this case we are attacking from all sides rather than concentrating all our forces at one door. 
 
We have 22 people signed up, most of whom probably have several rigs, and if we can spread out across a number of our lowest-ranked projects, we can make a considerable jump in DC Vault standings.  It doesn't matter whether they are math, science or biology, because all the project ranking points are added together, not normalized by category.
 
As an example - I spent 10 days with 2 rigs and got our team from last place to in the top 25% in SIMAP, earning us 7500 points in the rankings.  If we put a large number of people on a project where we are already in the top 25%, we might move to the top 10% in a week, earning us 1500 points.   You get more "bang for the buck" on our low-ranked projects.