Folding Forum

After 5 years of hard and honest work, including 4 years on F@H for 24 hours a day, I retired the 'GeForce GTX 750 TI' to replace it with a 'GeForce GTX 1660 Super' card also active H24.
Out of curiosity and to see how much faster the new board was I often checked 'F@H Advanced Control' and noticed that some projects have Base Credit at 29000, others 45900 or rarely 60500 while Estimated TPF varies between 3 mins 16 secs and 3 mins and 38 secs.
Estimated PPD ranges from approximately 450000 to 650000.

Why does the 'Base Credit' change from one project to another?


Thank you

(sorry my english)

Base credit variations is how the researchers try to balance points and make them fair between different projects which take varying times to complete the work .. some project WUs take a lot of processing power to complete whilst others take much less .. Projects that have long tpfs will tend to have higher base points ones with short tpfs less .. if isnt easy to get this right as they can only benchmark a few cards and the results can vary on how slow/fast the card is .. sometimes the faster cards get really beneficial points other projects it I'd ghd slower cards .. it has been very variable recently due to the nature of some of the projects especially those related to moonshot

The current WU has a TPF of 3 min 37 sec but a Base Credit of 29000.
Others calculated earlier had, for example, a TPF of 3 min 14 sec and a Base Credit of 45900 or even 60500.
This seems to disagree with what you expressed and what I thought too.
The Estimate Credit and Estimate PPD calculations also seem to disregard that rule.
From this comes my curiosity.

There has been some variability lately with especially the moonshot projects giving somewhat generous points .. so it is entirely possible for you to have had oddities .. the points system is explained [https://test.foldingathome.org/support/faq/points/]

Without information on which projects you are seeing these figures for, we can only guess. There are several factors involved, first is the total number of atoms that are part of the WU. That is shown as part of the information on the Project Summary page - https://apps.foldingathome.org/psummary. The more atoms, the greater the complexity, and the longer it will take to calculate. That gets higher base points

Next is the geometry of the protein system being looked at. Some geometries are easier to calculate all of the inter-atom forces, so will run faster and take less time. For WUs from different projects that have a similar atom count, the one that takes less time will get fewer base points.

Finally the projects are not all the same length when measured in "steps". A CPU project might cover 250,000 or 500,000 steps while a GPU project could be for 1 million to 5 million steps. Each of those steps covers 2 or 4 femtoseconds of simulation time. That total length of simulated time also affects the base points for a WU ad the other related values.

Thanks to both of you for the explanations.