World Community Grid

[Zopperoni]

I uninstalled it as well, I cannot make a valuable contribution if the program keeps restarting an assignment

[Asher]

The restarting is normal, and you get your points for them the next time you return a successful packet:

A "work unit" consists of various data including the protein sequence. The longer the sequence the "harder" it is to predict the fold. Longer sequence proteins take longer to process (sometimes much longer).

Due to the nature of the work, it's impossible to predict how long any specific work unit may take. i.e. it's non-determinsitic. That's really the beauty of putting this on a grid: it's a difficult computation problem.

Sometimes a work unit may not "converge" as we call it. This means it just hasn't found any way to fold this specific protein in a given amount of time and gives up. When it determines it can't converge it just stops working on it, sends it back (telling us it didn't converge) and you get a new work unit. However, it will try very, very hard before it gives up.

This would explain why you saw it processing for probably 4 hours and still be at 0.0%...then suddenly you saw it go to 0.4% and the CPU time went down. Points-wise, you should still get credit for the effort though.

Have some faith in that you really are helping to promote our understanding of the human proteome. If this was easy to do, we wouldn't have put it on the grid!
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Rick Alther
World Community Grid Application Developer

[MrWhereItsAt]

Silly people giving up because their computer's crunching gets nowhere within a few days/tries.

I know what research is like - signed up and joined.

AWESOME idea.

[Paddy]

is this something that us dial-uper's can get into?

[Unspeakable Horror]

I think you can, the installer asks what Inet connection you have.
The amount of data downloaded by the client is around 400Kb, and the client is just 1.5Mb.

[Zopperoni]

Originally posted by Asher
The restarting is normal, and you get your points for them the next time you return a successful packet:

Hey, cool

Originally posted by MrWhereItsAt
Silly people giving up because their computer's crunching gets nowhere within a few days/tries.

It's frustrating when other people get ten percent per hour while you don't even reach four percent in six hours.

[Skanky Burns]

I was at 0.8% after 8 hours. It gave up sometime after that, but I still got points for the processing time.

[Skanky Burns]

Originally posted by Paddy the Scot
is this something that us dial-uper's can get into?

Its working fine on my dial-up connection at the moment. It takes a while between packets, but then I'm used to DSL speeds.

[DrSpike]

/me points and laughs at dial-up users.

[Unspeakable Horror]

Originally posted by Skanky Burns
I was at 0.8% after 8 hours. It gave up sometime after that, but I still got points for the processing time.

That´s because it´s doing a very complex protein, the same happened to me but now after 17hs it´s at 24%.

[Skanky Burns]

/me takes the opportunity to announce that he now has unwired broadband!
My crappy dial-up modem is back into storage. Hooray for technology!

My next protein is much better, 10% after 1 hour.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by Skanky Burns

My crappy dial-up modem is back into storage. Hooray for technology!

That's more like it.

[Skanky Burns]

You can say that again.

[Dinner]

How stable is this and does it end up sucking alot of your resources? I wouldn't mind installing it if I could cap the amount of CPU and bandwidth it was allowed.

[Skanky Burns]

It only uses "spare" cycles and spare net connections. It uses all the spare cpu cycles when you allow it to run, but if you want your computer to run something else then the program does not run again until the cpu is once again unoccupied.