Folding@home Points FAQ

Table of Contents

Introduction

Much of what drives distributed computing is the sense of collegiate competition to compute the most for the project as possible. One way to quantitatively assess this is through the points that Folding@home (FAH) keeps track of (in our statistics or Stats pages). Here we detail the nature of how our points are determined and why that method is used. There are lots of methods one could use, but we've found that over time (and with extensive discussions with FAH donors) that our current method is a reasonable compromise, given all the complexity of awarding points for FAH work units.

How do you decide how much credit a work unit is worth?

Points are determined by the performance of a given machine relative to a benchmark machine. Before putting out any new work unit, we benchmark it on a dedicated 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 computer with SSE2 disabled. (more specifically, as reported by /proc/cpuinfo on linux: vendor_id : GenuineIntel, cpu family : 15, model : 2, model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz, stepping : 9, cpu MHz : 2806.438, cache size : 512 KB). This machine runs linux, so all WUs are benchmarked with the linux core. Note: Currently the linux and Windows fah_cores run at the same speed, so this does not impact points performance.

We plug the results of this into the following formula:

points = 110 * (daysPerWU)

where daysPerWU is the number of days it took to complete the unit. This equation was chosen to match the points for previous Gromacs WUs from the previous point system. The upshot is that Tinker WUs will be worth more than before we set up the new point system (i.e. before April 2004).

Please note that the very concept of a reference machine will mean that some WU performance will vary from the performance on your machine. Even between P4s, there are significant differences in architectures over the years. Moreover, variations between FAH WUs can also lead to differences in benchmarking points.

Our goal is consistency within a given definition of a reference machine setup (described above), but beyond that, the natural variation from machine to machine and WU to WU will never allow any point system to perfectly reflect what you get on your machine.

Why are some projects given significantly more points than others?

Certain projects require substantially more computer resources than others, either in terms of more disk space, more network transfer, or more RAM used. By default, these work units are given out to clients that opt in to request them. To reward those contributors for donating resources beyond the typical client, we currently give bonus points for these larger work units.

How big are bonus points?

Currently the bonus points are a 50% increase over the standard benchmark point determination (described above). Please note that this value is subject to change.

How do I configure my client to get bonus point WUs?

Please see our Configuration FAQ for these details.

Is there any risk of taking on bonus point work units?

These work units are larger and more experimental. For example, they often involve new cores, such as the QMD core. Thus, one should not run big work unit clients on non-dedicated machines. The bonus points are a reward for contributing more resources to FAH, and so you should not be surprised when these work units impact system performance and use the full resources of the computer.

Why can't AMD machines get QMD WUs, which have large points?

Please check out the QMD FAQ. We describe in great detail the situation regarding AMD chips and the QMD core. This situation is present only in QMD WUs, which represents a very small part of FAH.

For More Information, Please See:

• FAH FAQ
• QMD FAQ (important for those running with BigWU + advmethods settings)
• Gromacs FAQ
• Console configuration documentation for information about console switches
• GUI documentation for Windows or Macintosh
• Folding Community Forum

Last Updated on January 24, 2008, at 06:06 AM