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David Autumns
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Re: Smaller Work Units

OK fair point Ben
The question is why not have a 6 month duration work unit and then crunch it for a year and then post it back to WCG at the end, job done.

It’s down to motivation - I for one would not have built a 3200+ Athlon and have it on 24 hours a day if I could not see my tally of points increasing. I have 2 kids and they leave their PC’s on now when they go to school because they can see the graph of their points increasing. Try keeping kids interested in a project which runs in the background for days on end just warming their bedrooms. You could never keep them enthralled.

Avid crunchers upgrade their PC’s, build multiple PC’s, go around cajoling their disinterested family members and friends into joining their team just to see their teams rank, or their own increase slightly from day to day. All of this gets the task done more quickly which consequently benefits society as a whole.

I’m team captain of My Online Team and I have great fun pulling my buddies leg. He has “The Beast” an Athlon 3500+ but he’s the Hare and I’m the Tortoise. He turns his PC off at night (He can’t sleep for the Fan Noise) but the Team camaraderie causes him to leave his PC on as long as possible to edge me out. This contributes more processing power to the cause. A bit of competition is good. I think its exciting that 14360 PC’s were left on for the full 24 hours yesterday. That there are 22084 of us out there crunching after only 2 weeks since launch is cool. This is the best program or website my PC could be involved in.

The questions I have raised have not been answered. I have posted a “How many proteins are contained in a work unit?” thread but this is being ignored too.

I don’t believe we are working on 1 complete protein per work unit as we would have completed the task by now with the number of WU returned. I would like to know what has been completed when the progress bar adds on another 0.4%? (I don’t sit watching my progress bar all day, honest, I’m a big fan of defrag raised eyebrow ) Can we have more or less of these? Rick Alther alludes to the fact that the WU’s are made up of 100 “sequences”, could we have just 50 of them per work unit instead?

My reasons for requesting smaller work units are detailed above in thread. I am not whining. I just think like Azkar that it would encourage the newbie crunchers the project has just recruited to stick in there for the long term.

nazgul_9 there is an application called UD Monitor that will allow you to download numerous work units that you can crunch while you are away from the net. get it here

As you can see I’m a tad passionate about the project, it’s a little bit more to me than something that just runs in the background. I want it to be a success. We are potentially helping to find a cure or a treatment for some of Mankind’s worst diseases.

Here an article in todays news of the kind of smart drug treatment this project will lead to

Keep on Crunching biggrin

Dave

Get in touch, email me here
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[Edit 3 times, last edit by David Autumns at Nov 29, 2004 10:52:46 PM]
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cool Re: Smaller Work Units

David, you mentioned wondering about overall project completion. The Institute for Systems Biology has a page about the Human Proteome Folding Project at http://www.systemsbiology.org/Default.aspx?pagename=humanproteome with a link to a news release at http://www.systemsbiology.org/extra/PressRelease_111604.html which says:

The Human Proteome project running on World Community Grid will split the problem of folding the Human proteome into millions of smaller problems called "work units".
. . . . . .
Utilizing unused CPU, these computers running the grid client will attempt to fold a single protein from the set of human proteins with no known shape; it will take several "work units" to fold a single protein and there are many proteins being folded. Each computer will try millions of shapes and return to the central server the best shapes found throughout the simulation. As the computers try to fold the protein chains in different ways, they will attempt to find the particular folding/shape that is closest to how the proteins really fold in our bodies.

So we still have millions of Work Units to go. Keep on crunching!
Lawrence
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David Autumns
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Re: Smaller Work Units

Thanks for the links Lawrence

Great Feedback.
Kind of adds to the idea that it may be possible to split the WU's into smaller less than complete protein molecule sizes

Just need some official response from Gridboy1/Admin/Alther.

If its taking a Athlon 3500+ a run time of over 3 days to complete a WU it's too long#

Keep up the good work

Dave
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Ben Pont
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Re: Smaller Work Units

Hi Dave,

I can appreciate your point. I'm sure there are a fair percentage of crunchers that want the mental/emotional reward of seeing the status bar progress and points added, especially kids who are pretty much hard-wired for instant gratification. Perhaps though, a valuable lesson for the kids might be that really important tasks take time, patience and persistance (and social cooperation), and that in the real world there aren't always instant results like there are in video games. Realistically, the novelty will probably wear off for them in the not too distant future anyway. At that point, will you still be able to convince them that there is still a lot of value in having their resources applied toward a huge goal, even if they no longer care about progress bars and points and team glory? I guess that was the point I had tried to make originally; that cultivating a mild and silent satisfaction that your computer is involved in a global effort, quietly solving a big problem which will have implications for human health and lifespans in the future, while you go about other "more exciting" tasks either on your computer or elsewhere is something worthwhile too.

Possibly, even for yourself, the fun of competition and glory, etc. will wear thin someday. At that point, there must be some other less stimulating motive to keep you involved.

But while you're still jazzed and gung-ho about things, I hope you channel some of that enthusiasm into trying to get larger organizations involved, not just family members and friends. I work for a global organization with hundreds of potential workstations that could be shouldered to the wheel. Unfortunately, I'm not an IT guy or in senior management, which could theoretically make things happen more easily, so I'll pitch a couple people I think would like the idea and see what happens. There are also other large organizations like churches, schools and universities, call centers, government offices, news organizations etc. that could be pitched. Since grid computing is a numbers game, it will be really helpful to have the agent installed on the computers of the aforementioned facilities, where the users may not know or care about the project or what the CPU is doing in the background (if they even know or care what a CPU is). Their processors are just as good as any!

Actually, I hope some of those SETI@Home crunchers jump over to our grid. Looking for space aliens is all fine and well, but I think a cost/benefit analysis between the two projects favors what we're doing more than SETI (IMHO). As I wrote that, it just occured that my comment might open up a flame war with any SETI lurkers here, so let me clarify. I can see how finding out that "we're not alone" would have a huge impact on human perspective, but mostly for those who think about this topic on a regular basis. The "gee whiz" factor for most of humanity will likely wear off by the time the next big murder case / celebrity sex scandal / Super Bowl / etc. rolls around. That's just human nature. It's a fairly common and publicized belief that Europa, which is just a stone's throw away, holds a vast ocean which probably is teeming with life of some kind. Yet, even this doesn't hold the average person's interest past a "hmmm...interesting". So, I don't think some "intelligent signal" of bleeps and blips from light years away is going to bring the world to its senses, with nations holding hands at the U.N. either. Besides, like the meteor from Mars which supposedly has a fossil on it, its authenticity and meaning will be endlessly denied and debated by the scientific community until E.T. lands and takes a crap on the White House lawn.

So, even though SETI has value in society, do you think some of you radioheads could peel off half of your grid and give some of that computing power to unraveling inner space?? Please? smile

(This post has been edited for profanity - nelsoc)
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[Edit 1 times, last edit by Former Member at Jun 21, 2005 11:44:57 AM]
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Re: Smaller Work Units

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. wink


Hi Ben
I think you hit the nail on the head with your post
Enough said
<GRAHAM>
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David Autumns
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Re: Smaller Work Units

Hi Ben

Just to clarify

I'm not a fly by night cruncher here today gone tomorrow as my 5 years of CPU time, and it has to be said over 1/2 million points, over at grid.org since April 2001 attest.

I'm not doing this for the points - you are right there are more important things in life than knowing you're 56.2% through your next work unit.

I jumped ship from grid.org to work on essentially the same project over here at WCG because it's new, refreshing and stirs up new interest in grid computing for the good of mankind. If you have a look at the stats for grid.org it has not suffered by the arrival of WCG. We have just got 22942 more individuals ~1/6 the total at grid already on this project all now contributing to the cause in just over 2 weeks, which can only be good news all around.

I have tried in 2 separate major corporations to get the UD agent on everyone desktop and some really powerful server farms but in each case it has come to naught. As part of a companies ethical policy running the UD agent for WCG must be good PR. However, companies computer use policies, the paranoia of security experts + the fact that the company’s have bought their PC’s/Servers to do the companies tasks not WCG’s. “It connects to the internet therefore it must be full of virus’s, trojan’s and spyware. It’s not secure they could be stealing company confidential information. It updates itself automatically and this could interact with all our other applications stopping them dead in their tracks” type nonsense. As I say I’ve been running the UD agent for 5 years now, have I had any of these issues? – NO – am I likely to on a project that requires absolute accuracy of the fully encrypted data it returns? – NO. I have tried. I have read in the UD forums of individuals running the agent, falling foul of computer use policies and being sacked, so be careful.

The thrust of this thread is Can the work units be made smaller? With my experience gained over at grid.org, reading through the FAQ’s and trawling through the forum I don’t believe that the work units have to have as long a run time as experienced at the moment. The ice is now finally cracking on this one as Alther has posted today in the consolidated wish list thread “We are looking at reducing the "average" time it takes for work units to complete” so it can be done, our whining has not been in vain.

“By reducing the time to complete a work unit you boost the stickyness of your crunchers to this project”

From Azkars original post

“I worry about people who have computers that are a couple of years old, or who don't leave their computer running 24/7. Some of these work units could take weeks to be returned.

The whole point of these distributed processing programs is that any computer - big or small - can make a contribution. If someone sees that it's going to take weeks to complete a single work unit, how much of a contribution are they going to feel like they're making? How much processing is going to get thrown away when someone uninstalls the program after trying it out for a couple of days?”

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WCG have set out at the beginning of the project to make a WU last, on average, one whole week on a 1Ghz PC. Have a look in the community maintained FAQ’s for details of this - All we are saying is “Could they be a bit smaller,please?”

Thanks

Dave

p.s. just reached 59% wink
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Re: Smaller Work Units

I'm surprised that you are telling us about protein folding pathways while you overlooked a very important fact. The human body contains only about 30,000 different proteins. There's no way that each computer is working on a single protein because there are currently over 30,000 devices running and with each work unit finishing in about 20 hours we would have finished this project days ago. What is more likely the case is that the central carbon of each amino acid in a protein is assigned x,y,z coordinates and the resultant structure is tested by the rosetta analysis. We are likely testing each possible set of coordinates (except those that are impossible because of steric hindrance or a stiff backbone as in proline).
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Re: Smaller Work Units

You're not doing a full protein per work unit because there are only 30,000 proteins. I think the program is generating a structure and then analysing the position of each amino acid one at a time. Therefore the longer the protein, the longer it takes to finish one iteration of the program. I have no idea however, how that fits into the actual work unit.
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joatmon
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Re: Smaller Work Units

I know nothing aout the techicalities of protein folding, and I have only completed a small number of work units. I have adjusted the disk setting in the profile, and it seems that workunits downloaded with a smaller disk setting take less time to process, and generate fewer points. I have not tracked the actual download size of a work unit.
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David Autumns
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Re: Smaller Work Units

Hi Joatman

I think this is probably more to do with luck of the draw rather than any physical change in the size of the work unit, with the time it takes to complete a WU it's difficult to spot a trend. I've been getting a bunch of smaller WU with no change to any PC settings. I'd set the value back to 10GB you get more points that way smile

My mate has just gone through 26 hours and he's just reached 10% on his 3500+ athlon 64. He reckons he'll next post a result on Sunday which is madness. Whereas I'm at over 8% after only an hour on a 3200+

Maybe WCG have reduced the size of the WU's they are now dishing out already but haven't told us - as we have now come to expect as the norm for this project.

Keep smiling and keep crunching

Dave
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