HI
Snagged from the UD site:

"Expected runtime is 20 hours per work unit give or take. Timeouts are 2weeks for cpu time and 3 weeks for wall clock time."

I have 11 AMDs at or over 2200MHz
Some are going 6 Hrs, and 2 may take over 30!

Calibrations simply can not be made using the
work units, on the performances of our PCs, or
the WCG Client.
It takes what it takes for each protein.

Robert

It seems like nearly everyone is whinning about how long a WU is...
How many times does it need to be explained, they can't predict how long it will be, hence this program even started in the first place! A protien can fold in many different ways, billions. Or hardly any. It's why they stuck this out on the grid mostly due to the near random length of time it takes to proccess each WU. Sending back partial data is a huge waste of resources, their recources which means it's just not going to happen.
People with some idea of the workings behind grid processing would understand that having to send back partial data, tracking it and its progress then sending it back out for someone else to try and crunch, them getting impatient and sending back yet more partial data, etc etc. Just isn't worth it. It's more efficient for everyone if you just left your slow system crunching away at that protien till it finishes.

However, saying that. It would be nice if the stats updated more frequently, such as at every 10% incriment of the WU you would recieve your already earned points. I think this would satisfy people alot more (and stop alot of this whinning).
Even though their PC is still chipping away at a week long WU, they're getting points every day for the CPU hours expended.
Far as I could find, the points are pretty much bassed on how much CPU time you've donated along with how many WU's you send back. The longer the CPU time for a WU, the more points you get. So really, a WU that's going to take 100's of hours is going to reward you more in points than doing 10 in half the time.

As a reference of comparison, I have a P4 @ 3.2 and a P3 @ 800mhz.
The P4 sent back 3 results within 12 hours, the P3 send back 1 result in 2 days!
But I got 870 points from the P3's single WU and only 234 points from the P4's 3 results!!!

If you set your drive size smaller in device manager you will get smaller work units. For some reason I'm getting download speeds reminiscent of my old 2800baud modem so i droped my device drive size smaller, at 2GB device size i seem to get WU's that I complete in about 13-20 hours (with p4 2.53). I imagine if I set drive size to 4Gb i would probably get 26-40 hour WU's. But then it would take me a week to download them.

Ok thanks for the enlightenment, now can you help me find out why it's takeing me hours to download a 3meg file from the server and then eventualy timing out and having to start over? I have cable modem and while I know my speeds can vary there is no reason for me to have problems fetching a 3mb file, should take seconds not hours. In fact for the first few days it did now though I have not gotten a new WU in almost 3 days!!!

I posted in Member-Member help forum and only got one response of someone telling me that cable was eratic in speed, while this is true to some extent, the diference between 1000mbps and 2000mbps is not enough to affect the download times of a 3meg file.

Help please if this is not fixed soon I'm just going to give up.

Hopefully, the satisfaction will come from knowing that the unused CPU cycles, plus the passage of time that were formerly going to waste are now chipping away at complex problems that will benefit society as a whole. I don't think users are meant to impatiently stare at the progress bar. It's meant to simply run in the background quietly while you go about your business. If you want computer-driven excitement, there are other programs / websites for that.