Folding Forum

I've noticed they've gradually gone down from 5 petaflops to 4.5 over the past couple of months (i.e. not just because of the recent stat updates). Any ideas why? Maybe different WU's end up resulting in different FLOP counts? Or maybe a changing failure rate for GPU WU's? I suppose this is just speculation, but I like to see those stats go up .

For one thing:
Summer is coming and it does get a bit warmer outside - no additional heating is required and a lot of machines are being turned off.

Also the troubles that the ATI users are having with the new core and drivers is taking a tole on production. You can look at the ATI stats and since the new improved 1.24 and drivers came out it has been going down hill. We have gone from a high of around 500,000 PPD with aound 750 active members to around 400,000 PPD with 750 active members. About a 20% loss in production. Hopefully they will get it figured out before to long.

The number of PS3 users has dropped a lot, too. A few months ago that number was at over 50,000, but now it's closing in on 35,000. That number was higher due to a bunch of people experimenting with LWP, but at this point I think everyone's done experimenting, and a bunch must have stopped using it. In addition, I think people must have realized that it gives pretty lousy PPD/W, and thus stopped folding because of a lack of return on the power invested. 200 W for 900 PPD is not good at all, and even 115 for the die-shrunk models is still bad compared to basically every other piece of hardware out there.

A small contributing factor is, I believe, the eradication of a bunch of illegally installed CPU clients. Apparently someone attached an virus to a no-cd crack that installed the WinCPU client on the infected computer and contributed under a specific name and team. When alerted to this, the Pande Group nullified the offending usernames and team. Not too long ago there were around 310,000 active CPUs, and now there are less than 290,000. Granted, this doesn't have nearly as large an affect on the overall FLOPS, but it is a factor.

I think the heat's probably one of the biggest contributors. Hopefully once fall comes around we'll see an increase in numbers.

In this economy? Tough to fold when you're unemployed and they take your house and everything in it.

Zagen30 wrote:The number of PS3 users has dropped a lot, too. A few months ago that number was at over 50,000, but now it's closing in on 35,000. That number was higher due to a bunch of people experimenting with LWP, but at this point I think everyone's done experimenting, and a bunch must have stopped using it. In addition, I think people must have realized that it gives pretty lousy PPD/W, and thus stopped folding because of a lack of return on the power invested. 200 W for 900 PPD is not good at all, and even 115 for the die-shrunk models is still bad compared to basically every other piece of hardware out there.

...

Even though the summer is over, the new PS3's are 90w and 1100ppd and silent, the number of users is now 28k.

The PS3 is currently 1/3rd of all the petaflops.

Whatever "carrot" is being used on the PS3 donkey isn't tasty enough. I'm not sure the majority of PS3 FAH donors are even aware that "points" even exist, so I doubt that's a useful carrot. More of a marketing/PR issue than a technical one. I only found FAH by accident while trying to change a setting on a PS3 for the kids.