Points & Floating Point Operations

[Burlingtonian]

I understand from Folding@home that WU's are benchmarked to determine their points value and I also see many comments referring to points as a measure of science performed. My question: Can points be correlated with floating point operations performed?

[Neil-B]

Yes and no (probably more no than yes tbh - edited) ... in base points there will be a fairly close correlation (loosely so not direct - edited) subject to vagaries of benchmarking and project methodology ... but the QRB processes wraps this by introducing a time based element to point allocation ... there is an FAQ on the main FaH website that explains in some detail how the points are calculated iirc

[bruce]

Be careful. Though you didn't say it, you may be assuming something incorrect about GPU performance numbers.

Floating point operations performed cannot be correlated with the GPU's advertised theoretical GFLOPS performance numbers. If a GPU has, say 5000 shaders, it takes the same amount of time to perform 5000 Floating Point Operations as it does to perform 1 FLOP.

A GPU with 2500 shaders running at twice the clock rate will have the same GFLOPS number but will perform quite differently.