New Points System!

Wrah · Post by **Wrah** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 2:11 am

It's official: New points are in - David

New reference machine for points determination
http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegrou ... /news.html

4/18/2004 New reference machine for FAH points determination
In the coming week, we will roll out our new points determination system. The advantages are:

There will be much more standardization for points and deadlines.

The points and deadlines will be determined on a more modern machine (2.8GHz P4), although they will be scaled to match current Gromacs projects.
What is the upshot of all of this? Put simply, Tinker WU points are about to go way up, Gromacs will be mostly the same, and there will be less fluctuation between projects. All currently running projects will be re-evaluated and all new WUs will benefit from this change, once it has been instated.

...

dukla2000 · Post by **dukla2000** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 3:45 am

I figure it is a good thing. The current system means I just got 5.2 points/hour for a Gromacs I finished, and am currently on 1.3 points/hour for a Tinker I got slugged with. Will hopefully quell the urge I get sometimes to cancel a WU

[offtopic] Interesting tables on that news page with the OS breakdowns at 130k (Feb) and 145k (Apr) CPUs. Overall growth 12%, Win 10%, MacOS 32% (we know why) and Linux 21%. Another stat to keep the boys in Redmond awake. [/offtopic]

isp · Post by **isp** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 4:34 am

Sounds like a good thing to me.

unregistered · Post by **unregistered** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 4:51 am

Long overdue!

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 11:47 am

Too bad the new points system is not in place already. I have been absolutely BOMBARDED with Tinkers. SEVEN of the damn things, including 5 of my 7 blades.

I agree, the new benchmark machine is long overdue. I mean come on, a 500 MHz Celeron? Of course, anyone with a processor which does not have SSE will now have the oppotunity to bitch about the NEW points system, which "penalizes" them for Gromacs, but there's no way to make everyone happy, and besides, that's an AS (assignment server) issue, i.e. those machines should not be getting Gromacs anyway.

David

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 12:11 pm

I have temporarily made this an "Announcement" since this effects everyone and therefore everyone should know about it.

David

Wrah · Post by **Wrah** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 12:24 pm

It's scary how you now have the power to make me say anything you want.

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 12:28 pm

Wrah wrote:It's scary how you now have the power to make me say anything you want.

I did add the first line in your post, the bolded one. I also slightly changed the title of the thread. Since I made it into an "Announcement", I wanted it to read a bit different. That's all I did.

David

mas92264 · Post by **mas92264** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 12:33 pm

Thanks for posting this, Wrah.

M

Wrah · Post by **Wrah** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 12:35 pm

That's what they all say!

Today it's just an edit, but tomorrow...

Relax, I'm rarely serious.

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 12:36 pm

Whew! Thought I was gonne get HAMMERED!

Got caught with my hand in the cookie jar, I did.

David

Wrah · Post by **Wrah** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 12:42 pm

And thank KWSN, I found it on their forum.
Not that I ever hang around in there...

I was just checking if they were writing anything about us..

I do that once in a while..

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 7:58 pm

It's official, the new points system is in effect.
Here is the announcement.

Stanford's Folding@Home FAQ has been updated to reflect the new points system:

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

Before putting out any new work unit, we benchmark it on a dedicated 2.8GHz Pentium 4 machine with SSE2 disabled. 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 to the previous point system. The upshot is that Tinker WUs will be worth more.

A P4 2.8 (running a single instance of FAH) should be worth 110 PPD.

David

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 8:40 pm

Both FAH LogStats and EMIII have been updated with the new points.

For LogStats, just go to Settings, General Settings, and click Update.

For EMIII, download a new protein file.

David

AZBrandon · Post by **AZBrandon** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 12:10 pm

Interesting.. I actually shut down FAH on all of my systems out of frustration when all 3 of them got tinkers. Maybe now it wouldn't be so bad.

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 1:59 pm

Tinkers are now worth enough to make it "worth it" to fold on just about any system, IMO.

HOWEVER, I remain UNCONVINCED that they are worth as much as Gromacs on a P4 system. Now, this may simply be due to my ASSERTION that not all Tinkers have been re-benchmarked on the new system. I am currently working three 70.9 point Tinkers, which are the same points, the same PPD/PPW, and the same sTinkers as they ever were.

And NO, I have NOT removed -advmethods from my P4 systems, nor am I going to until I see some PROOF that Tinkers are as desireable as Gromacs on this platform.

Edit: My Athlons are not faring any better. I have 6 Gromacs returning 700 to 800 PPW, and 1 Tinker doing 300.

David

AZBrandon · Post by **AZBrandon** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 2:32 pm

haysdb wrote:Edit: My Athlons are not faring any better. I have 6 Gromacs returning 700 to 800 PPW, and 1 Tinker doing 300.

Well don't feel too bad. I have a T'bred 2500+ doing 302ppw on one of the "old" 70.9 point tinkers right now, and even my freshly installed Barton 2400+ clocked @ 2.0Ghz with a Gromac is only showing an estimated 533ppw. Somehow none of the systems I've built really seems to be doing terribly impressive, but at least between all 3 of them I'm looking at 1400-1500ppw or so.

haysdb · Post by **haysdb** » Thu Apr 29, 2004 9:36 pm

Most people should have had a chance to see this by now, so I am removing the "sticky bit".

David