pointless.

another 2 hours 15 mins of an athlon xp 3200+ down the drain

This time tantilisingly close to 4% when "pop" 0% and back downloading another work unit. still stuck at 4 days 4 hours and 2 mins 36 seconds with 2857 points as I have been all day

Suggestion: I'd love a log screen.

This is just a suggestion, but if there were a seventh button on the interface, that gave us a log screen which would let us know what has been processing in the last X days/hours/minutes...

This would help demystify the reset frustrations a lot of us are experiencing. The log could tell use in a few words why a reset occurred.

Secondly, if it's not a faulty machine that caused the reset, but simply that the protein cannot be folded, then that _is_ information and the CPU time was valuable in providing that answer. Points motivate me to keep my computer going. I'd like to see points for that.

Those two things would improve things in my opinion.

tkoegel
Yes I see your point. It would help the Newbies calm down too.
Weeding out the useless parts is fully as important as
getting a Full result. But Knowing that your not wasting all that power
on bad software would be nice too. I've been doing this stuff
for years now........It usually gets explained soon enough.
But a Button for a detailed Log file would be great.
Robert

Leave us an email addy Dave....

ONE MORE TIME CLASS

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

Does anybody work at WCG who believes we users have a valid concern?

Both machines I have installed this on no longer complete any work unit. I have no idea if they download a second one. The information I would need to be able to make an intelligent assessment of the situation appears to be hidden from me. No logs, no view as to actual progress, no state with regard to current work in progress, stats updated too slowly to be meaningful for much, no indication that WCG believes any of this is bad.

GUIs that hide information the user needs are evil. If your tool does something people perceive as mysterious, then fix the GUI to not create the mystery. I think the idea of the project is worthwhile. Once you lose your participants to an unwillingness to even admit to a problem, you may never get them back.

Looking for ET seems to be all I can put my half-dozen UNIX machine to work on. I had hoped to put the windoze boxen on this, but it seems to be a total waste. I have no confidence that anything beyond the first couple of work units has been achieved. I guess I'll head over to grid.org and see what they're doing. If they aren't any different, I suppose it's back to hunting for aliens.