Agreed. I would like to assuming the people running/supporting (IMB?) this project are aware of the issue and are working on it. However, even just a brief note to confirm this would be helpful. Or, maybe this is the way it's supposed to work for some reason, and people are just getting enough into it to find out. Either way, I know communication would be appreciated.

On the flip side, it would be nice if people were just a little patient. The whole point of this project is to run in the background, so if it isn't working right for a short time I don't see the need to pull the plug so quickly. Let's give this a chance to succeed, any project of this magnitude will have some sort of growing pains.

Running SEARCH on Alther in the Forum, I see that his last posts were made 11/20/2004. Almost his last post was on the thread ‘Re: 2 hrs 50 mins and still 0.0%??’

“
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-deterministic. 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

[Nov 20, 2004 4:37:25 AM]
“

Apparently it is normal for a Work Unit to end unexpectedly after much time and little progress due to non-convergence. His post seems to assume that points are awarded even in this case, which has not been my own experience. His very last post was made just minutes after this post. So maybe he is working on this bug and not communicating?

Totally agree with all the comments in this topic, i've been running for 3 days and every unit has aborted, someone mentioned something about some IP addresses from inside the IBM Research allocation kept triggering his firewall, he allowed it and since then he has no longer had any failed work units.

I've just tried it myself, and so far so good, but i'll see what happens, if it later fails or completes.

Please read the following. This should hopefully answer your question:

Why are points not updated even though new work units have been downloaded?
Several situations can cause this to happen:

1) Problems experienced during the transmission of results may cause the return to be discarded. This is very rare. If you are consistently not getting points, this probably doesn't apply to you-its probably one of the issues below.

2) Check to see if your number of work units returned is incrementing. If it is, you may have a bug in which the software works for long periods of time, but only reports a very low cpu time on task. This is very infrequent. If your number is not incrementing, you have a different issue.

3) Sometimes a computer "hiccup" causes the software to abandon the work unit. This may not be noticeable if you leave the software running in the background with unrestricted access to the internet, in which case it may appear that the software completed the work unit and downloaded a new one when it did not. It would also account for recent reports/posts where members notice that the software only gets xpercentage done then logs in and downloads a new work unit.


If you systematically do not receive points but are constantly downloading new work unit, please check the software's directory for legacy work unit files. The default directory is c:\program files\world community grid, and the work unit files are World Community Grid_#, where the # is replaced by a number. There is no extension, and the icon should be the windows symbol because they are not associated with any application.

Doing a clean install of the software should alleviate this problem. To do a clean install of the software, please do the following:

1) Close the software by minimizing the window if it is open, then right clicking on its icon in the system tray and clicking on "Exit."

2) Uninstall the software from [Start][Settings][Control Panel][Add/Remove Programs].

3) Check to ensure that the software's directory (by default c:\program files\world community grid) has been deleted. If it is not, delete it and all files.

4) Check for the presence of World Community Gridwin dll file (in c:\windows\system in windows 9x and ME or c:\winnt\system32 in NT and 2000). If it is still present delete it.

5) If you have your original install file, delete it.

6) If you performed any of the above manual deletions, empty the recycle bin.

7) Install the latest service pack updates from http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/. Download a new copy of the software.

8) Restart your machine.

9) Open Task Manager by holding down the Ctrl and Alt keys and hitting Del once. Highlight each program and click on End Task. If using Windows 9x you must open Task Manager again for each entry. The only entries that you do not want to run End Task on are Explorer, Systray, and your firewall.

10) Install the software from the newly downloaded file. Restart the computer.


I got the above information from the following link: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/join_now/points_system.html

Timmy Kassis