Folding Forum

I am looking for a ball park figure. How many WU's/day are returned completed to folding @ home? Hundreds? Thousands?

That was a harder question than I thought. I looked at the stats sites with links in the forum header at the top of each page (Extreme OC and Kakao) and neither had WUs in the top level stats - just points, number of teams, users, etc. There is another stats site, FreeDC that similarly didn't have the WU stats. But, the forth one - [H]ardfolding does. Link below. And, I've extracted the current info from the site - showing the number of project-wide points and results (aka Work Units) per 3 hour update, the most recent 8 days, the most recent 8 weeks and the most recent 8 months.

FYI, these times and dates are Pacific Standard Time zone.

"["H"]"ardfolding F@H Statistics >> Project Information

Wow....429,000 WU's completed this week. I average 1 per day. God I'm pathetic.

RMouse wrote:Wow....429,000 WU's completed this week. I average 1 per day. God I'm pathetic.

We weren't going to say anything...

actually, you're just like the majority of folding donors.

RMouse wrote:Wow....429,000 WU's completed this week. I average 1 per day. God I'm pathetic.

You asked the question. When there's hundreds of thousands of participants, the rates stack up quickly. Just do what you can.

its only if you have a gpu farm or access to lots of hardware that you rack up lots of WU, most people only manage a few a day at best - even the big heavy hitters who get millions of points a day.

Every WU counts - and whose to say that your 1 WU isn't the one that leads to something big being discovered

Enough small creeks form mighty rivers...at least that's what we say where I live

RMouse wrote:I am looking for a ball park figure. How many WU's/day are returned completed to folding @ home? Hundreds? Thousands?

Mr. RMouse:

I've been folding (almost continuously) since 7:32 P.M. CST December 11th. I've kept pretty careful track of my numbers. As of 7:32 P.M. tonight, I have 59,763 points and 140 WUs completed, so I'm averaging around 8.75 WUs per day. I was feeling pretty bad about my production, (especially when compared to some of these "teams"), but I have to take into account the fact that my machine is a dinosaur - it's almost 6 years old! (Considering how old my box is, 8 WUs a day is not so bad ...)

Back when I bought my box it was top of the line - and cost around $3,500.00. Nowadays I could buy three or four multi-core i7 SMP machines for that price and get [at least] 5x to 10x the production, so don't feel bad. Compared to the latest screamers, any machine that is more than three years old is a turtle. When I get around to upgrading my hardware, I'm going to smoke all these teams. (Ha! Ha!)

Alan C. Lawhon wrote:I was feeling pretty bad about my production, (especially when compared to some of these "teams"), but I have to take into account the fact that my machine is a dinosaur - it's almost 6 years old! (Considering how old my box is, 8 WUs a day is not so bad ...)

Don't. Mine is a modern dinosaur, your six year old still has way more CPU muscle than my ~2 year old. Sometimes I get points envy watching i7 setups and the like, not to mention some 4P folding monsters which can easily beat my 2 year folding efforts with the Atom330 rig in a week or so. Then I remind myself why I built my little setup in the first place: peace and quiet. Initially it was completely silent. Not just quiet, silent. Even the PSU is external fanless brick, laptop style. No fans at all, the massive passive heatsink alone was enough to keep temperatures at bay, although only barely.

Eventually I got bored with total silence bragging rights, so I kludged a whisper quiet quality 120mm fan (with 6 year warranty) to the case and slapped in a passively cooled GT430, just for folding. It's rather pathetic, points wise, but has pretty decent PPD / Watt ratio even without Quick Return Bonuses. Stable, too, as long as I don't go overboard with overclocking experiments - I don't have to worry about it much even if I occasionally leave it unattended for a few days. So I take pride in being a fairly steady producer instead:

I've thrown together a couple sets of stats for my own home network. Both of the stats sites update every three hours - kakao calls it "Update", while EOC calls it "hourly" - which it isn't.

It's not hard to get quite a few work units regularly - but it is very variable, depending on the particular projects at hand. For example, my three GPUs have been getting since Dec 19th a steady diet nothing but Project 762x work units - each worth 14,093 points. But since they are so big, they take a lot longer to finish than, say, the 5757 point Project 8018s, which I have gotten hundreds of. In the week ending Dec 16th, I had a LOT of points, but very few work units. The week prior, I had fewer points, but a lot more work units.

I have four computers - two laptops and two desktops in my farm - with seven folding slots - two SMP8, two Uniprocessor, three Fermi/Kepler GPU. The two old XP machines weren't getting all that many points until the recomputing of the GPU points values. The lowly GT430 will crank out about 6600 points per day on the project 762x work units - albeit fairly slowly. There is a constantly changing mix of work units that may have more or fewer points per work unit.

No particular message here - but just keep folding whatever is thrown at you. As always, YMMV.

Stats from Kakao Stats web page Stats from EOC web page plus my configurations

# of WUs isn't really a good indicator. Some WUs can be worth 1000x what others are worth but obviously take much longer to complete as well. Between teams I've done nearly 18k WUs over many years but most of the points come from a small portion of those WUs.