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