JMorgan - Wow. I hope all the work units aren't this long. Even with a very decent machine, this one seems to be taking forever. The client says it's on 10600 out of 20000 frames and should be done in another 2 days.
Likely, you are folding a Gromacs work unit.
I've looked on the folding@home forum about the discrepancy between how the client shows 20000 frames, yet their site shows this particular protein as having 100 frames. Is there a reason for this?
As far as I know all proteins currently issued have 100 frames per Work Unit. Several proteins are broken into steps, some have 20,000,000 steps with 200,000 steps per frame, but they still 100 frames. When Stanford was issuing Proteins that fold on a Tinker core, many of those had 400 frames. (Edit - I checked Stanford's Projects, they are still issuing Tinker work units and they are 400 frames.)
How long do your work units take on average?
The Stanford performance benchmark for the p21xx Work Units (Gromacs) are about 3 to 3.5 days to fold on a on a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 machine.
The point value of the particular protein provides a good indicator of how long it will take to fold. The standard benchmark (as I recall) is 110 points per day on a 2.8 GHz P-4 machine. For example, a standard Gromacs protein that has 396 points would require about 3.6 days to fold. That is, if one were using a 2.8 GHz P-4. On other machines it could take more or less time.
The newer Core Duo and Core 2 Duo CPUs fold considerably more per GHz than the benchmark P-4s. On older desktop CPUs (a year or so old), AMD CPUs typically fold faster, on a per GHz basis, than Intel P-4s. As for IBM CPUs in Mac computers, G5s do pretty well per GHz, and G4s are very slow. The Intel CPUs in newer Mac machines are based on the Core architectures, so they are very good folders.
Of course there are other issues, multiple-core CPUs and SMP, GPUs, PS3s etc. All these use different F@H processing cores.
The word "core" as used in FAH context has two meanings. One "core" is the number of hardware processing units in a central processing unit (CPU) such as dual-core. The other of the word "core", refers to the software program that performs the calculations; Tinker, Gromacs, Double-Gromacs, GBGromacs, Amber, Gromacs SREM, QMD, etc.
Edited by dnamechanic, 28 March 2007 - 02:26 AM.
LongeCity
