questions

[BigRed]

well i just joined the oc folding@home team :), i got a new p3 700e@933. i got the folding@home thing to run this processor at full load to see if its stable at the speed, and it is :). i was going to delete the program after i was done testing then i thought i could just run it when im sleeping and at work since im not on my computer anyway.
anyway i got a couple questions:

I was a member of the seti@home thing a while back and i quit it cuz i saw that no results could be found in my lifetime, lol. and i was wondering if there has been any promising results from this folding@home thing or when they expect some decent results to come from all these computers running this?

and whats the average time for a work unit to be completed? i complete 1 frame in 5min50sec and 1 work unit in 9h50min. is that good or bad?

and does it keep track of your work units completed even though you shut down your computer and restart folding@home? cuz i have the folding voyeur and it keeps saying 0 work units completed even though i got 3 done so far, would the folding@home server keep track of my work units? or is it just the voyer thats messed up?

[Ploaf]

Hi BigRed. Welcome to the team.
Good questions.
There is a very good possibility that positive results will be achieved through this project. There is a definite end goal and that is to recreate the folding of as many proteins in as short a time as possible. We are trying to do this. The results of this project should also prove helpful to IBM who is, right now, working on the creation of a supercomputer capable of one petaflop or roughly 1,000,000 or so times as powerful as your home PC specifically for the purpose of folding proteins. It is called Blue Gene. Pande Group(The Stanford U. Folding@Home folks) are working with IBM on Blue Gene using information that has been discovered through this project. They have a few years to go before they complete the building of the computer though, but the fact that they are building such a machine helps to demonstrate the importance of learning how proteins fold and it shows how much power is needed to perform these calculations. It also shows that they expect results. They have posted results of some of the proteins that we have folded already. It takes us a while because we will fold one protein several times over to make sure that the results are accurate. The number of contributors has been rather small for this project when compared to other projects which means that it has taken longer to get results as well. Hopefully as this changes so will the frequency with which we see some results. I don't feel that SETI was a complete waste of time though even if I can't say I care for the science of it. Finding aliens doesn't mean all that much to me but the interest that SETI has created in distributed computing and the fact that they were able to do so much with this method has proven to be it's biggest asset. I think they said that they mapped out the sky a couple of times(Is that right) already and haven't found anything yet which is why I looked for something else. Did I leave anything out??

As for the times per frame/100 frames for a PIII@933 - It looks to be just about right. :D