OK, UD points are the measure of your contribution to the World Community Grid project. Work Units can be big or small so this figure is just luck of the draw. You may be lucky and get 100 WU’s lasting an hour each or you may get 1 WU lasting 100 hours – In both these cases you will get the same number of points added to your total. Total run time measures your commitment to the WCG but does not allocate a weighting to your CPU power. Some people have slow PC’s others fast PC’s so this is where points come in as they are allocated based on your PC’s capabilities.

There are 4 measures (although the WCG has fixed one of the values permanently to 100) of your PC’s performance.
First and foremost your CPU’s capability. The value allocated is compared to what at the time of creating the agent was the fastest PC available a 1.5 GHz Pentium. After each Work Unit is completed your PC is benchmarked/compared against the 1.5GHz Pentium (a 1.5Ghz Pentium having a value of 100 ) so a 3.0Ghz Pentium would on average get a score of 200 for example. As this benchmark is run at the end of each Work Unit the value you see will vary depending on what your PC is doing at the time of the Benchmark. If you are in the middle of a PC game at the end of a work unit you will get a lower score than if the Work Unit completes while your computer is just sitting there idling. Over time these changes average out.
N.B. when the WCG agent is first installed and the first Work Unit is downloaded the benchmark is not completed and so, for your first work unit only, you will be allocated your points as though you had a 1.5Ghz Pentium in your PC i.e. 100 – good news for some and bad news for others.

The second measure is your Memory/RAM. Memory affects the performance of your PC and so a weighting is allocated to the amount of Memory you have in your PC with a score of 100 being allocated if you have 384Mb fitted. This was once again based on the best PC at the time of creating the agent. If you have 768Mb then you will get 200. Unless you change the amount of memory in your machine this value will remain static.

The third measure is Hard Disk Drive Storage with 5Gb being the biggest Hard Drive at the time this amount scores 100. 10Gb should score 200. However the maximum value is 196 This is explained by the WCG agent using 1000K bytes for each Megabyte and not 1024K resulting in a figure of 9.77GB instead of 10GB. Your disk space allocation is set on the WCG Website under Device Profiles and updated to the agent when the next Work Unit completes. At the moment I would suggest setting this value to 10Gb as that way you get the most points. Despite setting the value to 10Gb the WCG agent only occupies ~ 32Mb for the HPF project – this may change as future projects come along.

The final measure is Network and on the current agent this is an inappropriate measure of performance and so for everyone this is set to the value of 100.

The formula for calculating points is contained within the agent software. The company that makes the software considers this proprietary information, and has not divulged the formula used. By using my device scores and points awarded, my best guess for the points formula is:
Processor Score * 0.4 + Memory Score * 0.25 + Storage Score * 0.05 + Network Score * 0.3 = Overall Score rounded down to the nearest full number and capped to a maximum of 200

Your points per hour score is this value divided by just over 5.

So for a work unit lasting all day on your PC you will score approximately 4.8 * Your overall score points per day.

So there you have it points are the fairest way of measuring you or your teams contribution to the World Community Grid

Keep on Crunching

Dave