What is a work unit in basic terms
Posted: Mon Mar 16, 2020 3:33 am
Can someone describe what a work unit is in basic terms and how researchers create them? Just out of laypersons basic interest.
It takes a protein about 1 millisecond to fold into its final shape. But it takes more computer power than we have on earth to simulate that in one go.
So we divide that time up into Work Units we can solve in reasonable time frames and send them out to volunteers. My understanding is that with modern gear we can simulate a micro second each.
Once they see how the folding is going, they generate more Work Units farther out in time, so now we are all working on the second micro second. Eventually we get far enough in time so that the protein is stable. The researcher can also see those points where the protein was unsure which way to fold, he or she is interested in how it can misfold and how to prevent misfolding.
Our results are needed to make that next batch of Work Units so there are even more results. Generating new WUs is only about an hours work on a server and it makes lots of them. This weekend every time they had a new batch of WUs they were all downloaded in seconds. Hopefully Monday more researchers will be back at University. (They may not get to go, they may be locked out by CPVID-19 fears. I hope they can all work from home)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home#Work_units
That article says you can use a Pentium 3 with SSE, I think you now need a Pentium 4 with SSE2.1. It gets much faster with a 4th generation Intel Core CPU with avx-256.