Last updated 28-Feb-2004: A couple of things on the project I've compiled from own experience (running the client program etc.) and research into the United Devices website and message boards: - United Devices (abbreviated to UD below) is a commercial organization who make their money on farming out voluntary computing power for commercial projects next to some non-profit ones. Their projects so far: iArchives (distributed archival/retrieval of old newspaper and magazine publications in a digitized form, commercial), Genome research (HMMER, commercial), Exodus (intermittent web performance testing, commercial), Anthrax research ('Cure Anthrax'/THINK, non-profit), virus research against bioterrorism (commercial) and Cancer research (first phase was called THINK, second phase LigandFit, non-profit). Of these currently LigandFit and 'PatriotGrid' (Smallpox anti-virus research) are running, the Anthrax one has been concluded. Where below THINK is mentioned, read LigandFit (which is processing the fast THINK results with a finer sieve). We as 'Distributed Amiga' team only participate in the Cancer research because it seems the most worthwhile, is non-profit and to avoid splitting up resources too much. The client program (or agent, as UD calls it) works on any of the above depending on your settings (in the device manager on their website). Since new projects are enabled by default, make sure you switch them off and keep an eye on their website now and then. You can also set an option for a newsletter to be mailed to you, in which UD announces such new projects. Your device settings page is accessible once you have installed the client: click on 'view your scores and rewards' in the first window, this will open a browser which leads you to your personal homepage at www.ud.com (after logging in, password etc. is mailed to you once you create an account). Select 'My Devices' on the left, then 'Profiles', click on your profile name ('Default' unless you have created more, in which case you need to do this for all of them), scroll down to the 'current distributed computing projects' heading and make sure only 'Primary:, Intel-UD Cancer Research project' is checkmarked, then press save at the bottom. - The results of the Cancer research are to be made public after an estimated 6-12 months after the project is finished, research data and technical stuff may take about 2-3 years, there are also patent issues involved. The project was originally estimated to run for about one year but has been extended with new molecules due to the project's success. The results are to become property of the University of Oxford and the National Foundation for Cancer Research and be made open to the scientific community at large. At that time they will enlist the most appropriate partners to research the originally estimated 160,000 molecule derivatives that are to be created and researched from the likely candidates found by the distributed computing effort. The Oxford University group has put together a 45 node Linux cluster for further processing of results. A press release with a full description of the intellectual property issues can be found at http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/cancer/ipstatement.html They will attempt to point out those users who happened to come across the most useful bits, although it's more likely that all of the computation done as a whole will be instrumental for speeding up drug research. - Once you start running the agent, work is rewarded with 'points', based on the amount of work you, time committed and some machine characteristics. These points are used as 'webmiles' (similar to 'air miles'), and go towards charities, for now to the 'Make a Wish Foundation', which is an organization that grants for example terminally ill children their lifelong wish, usually involving meeting a person or becoming something they wanted to do later for a day. They were also used for prize contests. Formerly points were also used for prizes and sweepstakes, but as of 31 november 2001 UD have discontinued these: "United Devices has decided to discontinue all cash and prize promotions indefinitely. This decision, effective November 1, 2001, was prompted by the current economic climate and our desire to be very conservative with our expenses. Before making this decision, we conducted in-depth research of our Member Community and determined that most of you are motivated by helping others through our research projects and that most of you are not very motivated by the possibility of winning prizes. Based on this analysis, we plan to continue to make contributions to the Make-A-Wish Foundation on your behalf." It's probably a good idea to register with a valid E-mail address in case future contests will have awards tied to them. You could use some free hotmail type account for reasonable anonymity. Client program, website and other miscellaneous issues: - The client program works on one work unit a time with each 100 or 200 molecules against a single target protein, each representing one or half a percent of work. Each molecule by themselves may be more or less work, some could take hours (or days if you have a slow PC), some seconds. The amount of work is unpredictable, it is similar to OGR in that respect, although for the second phase (LigandFit) efforts have been made to minimize very large work units. This means the average time a single work unit is processed in takes a few hours on a reasonably modern machine. Every molecule in turn is subdivided into variations (a.k.a. conformers), and the checkpoint file is updated only after each full molecule, i.e. per half percent. The client does not yet save the work in the middle of a molecule if you shut it down. This means you could end up losing hours of work if the one you were working on is a complex one. As of May 2001 a new WU (work unit) format was introduced (and a new protein) with 200 molecules, With the new 200 molecule setup this should happen a lot less, also some pre screening was added to weed out the extreme cases. A future version will probably also contain better checkpointing. For now if you have a slower machine you have to check the datestamp on the cs.ud file manually to see when the last save operation was done and decide for yourself whether too much work is lost, in which case you may want to not shut it down until it is updated. Another note regarding this: the datestamp on that file is also changed if you change any of your preferences inside the client, in that case it cannot be used to see how long ago the last checkpoint was set. However, there is a third party tool that adds buffering functionality to the client called UD Monitor (and others like monitoring, back up): http://www.udmon.org.ru/ - also discussed here: http://forum.ud.com/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=6&t=002228 and http://forum.ud.com/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=6&t=003724 and http://forum.ud.com/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=6;t=006774 - Apparently Windows 95 (they don't say if 98 is affected as well) loses memory (so what else is new) and if you don't have enough of it, you may have to shut down the client and lose some work (up to the last checkpoint). This is probably just a Windows OS issue and they are pointing it out to be careful. Also on the side of caution they mention that once you have installed the client you should make a backup of the entire directory. It is possible that in a crash the work files get damaged and this results in all of your current work unit being lost, or even corruption of other client program files. There are only Windows 95 through XP clients for now, other platforms, namely Linux and MacOS are reportedly in development, it is however unlikely that there will be an Amiga port. - There are some minor client issues, like in the graphical view the pane on the left (right for new clients) may be empty, i.e. not showing a molecule, if the conformers counter is still running you are doing work, the molecule is just too complex or big to be shown. This may also happen when you just start on a new WU. Also, the UD team advises even if the counter is not running to wait a couple of minutes to see if it increases, other applications may put it on hold for a while (since the client runs with a lower than normal priority), or the calculation for the one you are working on might simply be very complex, or even very simple so it would be inefficient for the client to update progress display in the meantime. - The client used to make an initial download of 1.8 MB (on some machines I installed later this was reduced to 700 KB), after that it seems to need to up/download much less (I've seen ranges from a couple of kilobytes up to 130 or so). However, that initial download may be repeated when a client update is done, or change with new client versions. The client autoupdates itself, when a new version is out and the next time you finish a complete work unit, so be prepared to see some longer modem/network activity now and then (usually every few months or so). Also, you can set aside up to 10 GB of HD space for the agent in your member preferences on the UD website, but this is major overkill for the THINK project, the current needs are much much lower (a few hundred K maybe). This is done for future projects and caching of work data once the client supports it, also see next point on benchmarking. Such data is put in the directory you installed the client to until the client offers a specific setting for this. If you have less space available than the amount you set that number will be used instead. You can configure separate device settings so you can have more or less HD space set for different machines you run the clients on. Note though that this space is not actually used in any way, it's just a setting that might do something later with other projects. - For a while part of the stats system was somewhat broken, or unfair, but this has mostly been fixed in the 12-Oct-2001 client update: The agent benchmarks your machine every time it fetches new work and compares it to a top of the line system. CPU clockspeed, memory size, available HD space and network speed are taken into account. The individual and team statistics list both units returned and 'points' which is based on 'CPU time used' as counted by the client (basically an internal clock counting how long the client has run), multiplied by a weighted modifier based on the benchmark. Older client versions were inaccurate in establishing this modifier, since each benchmark category has a fixed weight, some were out of proportion for THINK, some inappropriate, some oversimplified and some simply inaccurate. This meant that although you did the same amount of work the point totals could vary a lot. For example the top of the line system default was a comparison to a 1500 MHz Pentium 4 CPU, all the benchmark did was compare your MHz number to that 1500. In later releases a 1500 MHz Athlon would rate rate as ~150% of the P4 at the same MHz speed, so this issue has been fixed. Two things remain: set your HD space preferences on your UD member page to 10 GB, it won't be used for THINK but you'll get more points. Secondly the quality of your connection will affect the points per work unit completed as well (although not as much in recent client updates as before), so you might want to hold downloads or other network traffic during work unit flushes, if you happen to be at the machine when they occur. From my own experience over dozens of completed units the amount of points average out per unit of work done (I had a very unstable cable connection which gave me wildly varying points due to the networking benchmark), but I do get more points overall for the same amount of work than someone with a slower modem connection. The points issue is someonewhat moot since prizes have been halted except for stats ranking. The real goal is of course to do as much work as possible. - The minimum system requirements list 48 MB RAM and 20 MB free HD space. - You can keep running RC5, OGR or other projects concurrently, CPU time is divided based on priorities. There is of course some overhead due to context switches but this is negligible on a fast machine. It may even be beneficial to work on several things at once in case different parts of the CPU or system are used for different projects, or in case once of the projects is less efficient and can benefit from other work being interleaved. Also, for SMP clients and other more efficient OS versions which have higher processor affinity per task and/or less overhead for taskswitching the above is worth considering even more. - There is no manual way of initiating a network connection for now, it will try to connect when a unit is finished, but this may be in some future version. The same goes for checkpointing, although it does it better in recent versions. I have no idea how it handles modem only connections, but from what I understand it will try to auto-dialup if your Windows settings are set as such (dial on demand) and your dialup password is saved of course. Also, the client does not buffer work for now, so it will want to connect every time you have finished a complete unit, it can't work offline until you do so. This also means you cannot use any machine which does not have a direct connection to the Internet at least part of the time. Once work has been downloaded to your machine it does work on it offline of course. However, there is a third party tool called UDDialup which is apparently meant for regulating dialup access (not tested here): http://www.geocities.com/chronosbear/uddialup.html Together with the UD Monitor program mentioned above doing buffering of work this should address most off-line issues. - Stats in the client are only updated once the work has been sent off, personal stats on the UD webpages should be updated a couple of hours later at most, team stats are normally updated once a day. Some of the changes you make to your member info on the UD website may not be updated until you send some work and it is registered. The timestamp on the submitted work may be later than the actual date/time you submitted it. Also, if you have more than one machine, since each client gets the info it displays from the UD server, total CPU times and points displayed are aggregated, so each client will show the total for all of them registered under the same username. - The client installs a screensaver on installation as well as putting itself into your startup folder (it runs minimized in the systray), if you don't like screensavers or use your own you can disable it. In fact, you should disable it anyway, since the client runs faster without the screensaver! There is an option in the client preferences to make it run _only_ as a screensaver, in that case it will only do any computation while the screensaver runs (which starts depending on your normal screensaver settings, if you have switched off the screensaver in Windows settings, obviously it doesn't run at all). I'm not sure how Windows handles the screensaver if you have the powersaving feature switched on which switches off your monitor (DPMS for example), if it is intelligent the screensaver should be stopped and with it the client (if you run it as screensaver only). Running the client can only be done when you are logged in which would normally be the case for most single user Windows systems such as 98, but if you are on a multiuser NT or W2K box which is sometimes 'logged out', it won't run, even when installed as a service. You can still make it run though even when logged out if you run it as a screensaver which is active at all times (when it kicks in after no activity of course). This may require some registry editing or administrator rights for the machine, please search the UD message board or M$ site for this topic. If you need to pause the client often, it's a better idea to use the snooze button instead of shutting it down and restarting all the time since this way no partial unsaved work is being lost. You can set a time in minutes for this function, the default is 5 minutes, the maximum is 120 minutes. I found this worked fine for playing some Q3A or UT :) - In one instance I initially could not manage to install the client (Win98), the installation window briefly flashed onto the screen to disappear a fraction of a second later. I solved this by rebooting into safe mode and installing there, the client installed fine after that and ran as expected in normal mode. - When the client starts after a reboot (possibly after being shut down and restarted too) it might try to briefly connect to the UD server, possibly to check for a client or project update, to see if the project is still running etc. I have not found any info on this, and since my connection is always up I don't know if it will try to auto dialup if your system is set up for that. If you're quick enough to open the client window when starting it (since it usually starts as a minimized systray icon) you will see the message about connecting. I pulled the network cable once to see if it made any difference but the client ran fine anyway, so it may just be a startup message, or the client checking whether there is a network at all. - Team stats have been expanded, you can look at team listings sorted by name, number of members, results, points or CPU time contributed, and look into the teams for the same info per member of the team. You can also search for team names, or words contained in the description the team has set (there is a slight bug if you click on the arrow above the category, if the name contains spaces some browsers will not encode those spaces, replace them with a plus sign when needed). All teams are public for now, so if you want to stay anonymous, use an appropriate nickname. There was also some daily and monthly top 10-250 individuals lists for the prizes. There is an overall meter for accomplished work in millions of CPU hours, results returned, amount of members and machines. - The UD website (www.ud.com) may now and then be busy, showing only a message that the site is inaccesible, or not serving parts of pages which include information from the member database. - When initially installing the client it requested a loginname and password, the password I used contained some of the usual 'not quite alphabetical' characters a good password should have. This seemed no problem and I could log in on my member page at the UD site with it, but after looking at the page where I could change my password it said you shouldn't use any special characters, including shifted numbers (!@#$%^&*()/;_' etc.). Thankfully I could enter a new password without any of those. On the other hand you can use up to 15 characters for the password. - In your preferences on the UD site you can set a challenge/response phrase so you can retrieve your password if you forget it. - If you want to reach some of the pages and not be entering your password all the time, you need to have cookies enabled, without this you can also not submit some of the info or change some settings on the website. Also, for navigating to some pages you may need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. - There are some other issues with the website, you can give each of your machines a separate name and device settings, but the first character of the name can't be a number or you will get a password error when trying to log in, also the same happens if your settings are ok but their server is too busy. Currently you cannot delete a device in your device settings, so the number shown will increase each time you reinstall the client for example. You can actually 'misuse' this, installing a new device will give it an ID number that is sequential, so the number you get then will show how many devices are registered with UD (that's at least what they say, but then again isn't that number too high because of database pollution of people reinstalling? :) It would seem increasing the number of machines arbitrarily is also good for influencing prospective customers and investors. - The client uses ports 80 and 443 (outgoing) when up/downloading work or if you click on an option which opens your browser, these are for the UD server's HTTP and SSL ports, so if you are using a proxy or firewall, change the settings appropriately (although you would probably already allow these ports if you want to be able to browse properly). In the client you can also set a secure HTTP or Socks 4/5 proxy if you are behind one. - On the UD website (www.ud.com) one of the navigational menu items is 'message boards', some of the above info was gathered there, you might want to check it out sometime to see discussion of client operations and news, lots of questions you may have could already have been answered there. This text is a loosely compiled and updated document and may be out of date for extended periods of time. - The address for support question for this effort is support@ud.com, but I will answer any questions I can and/or those that relate to the Amiga team and efforts it is involved in, such as RC5/OGR. For the cancer research specific stuff, use ud-think(at)amiga.REMOVETHIS.xs4all.nl (address obscured against spambots, replace (at) with @ and remove the capitalized word) Since this document is updated only intermittently it might be out of date in places, the UD website and message boards are a good place to check on latest info. If you find any obsolete info or mistakes please mail :) In conclusion: there are/were some rough edges to this project (mainly that UD is a commercial entity and thereby try to 'encourage' you to run their commercial projects in various ways), so I've tried to write a critical but objective summary, but eventually the research into a cancer treatment drug does serve a good cause. With client updates, adjustments to the UD website and appearance of third party tools to facilitate operations the above text has grown a bit milder, if you correctly set it up there is no reason not to participate. There have been several client updates since the effort started, making it faster and better behaved, the same goes for the website. Also several new target proteins have been added to the project since. As of the date of this writing we have 110 members participating and have contributed over 75 CPU years to the THINK/LigandFit Cancer research project. If you have any input on the above text (broken links for example), don't hesitate to mail ud-think(at)amiga.REMOVETHIS.xs4all.nl with your suggestions. (address obscured against spambots, remove the capitalized word and replace the (at) with @). EOF