What are bigadv Work Units?

Big Advanced (bigadv or BA) is an experimental type of Folding@home WUs intended for the most powerful CPUs in Folding@home. Our goal is to use bigadv to work on projects that are particularly large (memory utilization, upload/download requirement) and require a large amount of computation. We are all fortunate in that processors get faster over time, so the highest-performing tier of donor machines also gets faster over time. We have a lot of exciting science being enabled by FAH donors, and it takes place at all levels of computational requirement and performance sensitivity.

These units have extremely tight deadlines and require a minimum of sixteen physical CPU cores. Some systems, especially for hyperthreaded CPUs, may not be able to complete the units in time, so this core count is not an absolute requirement. Bigadv Work Units can at times consume approximately 750 MB of RAM per CPU core, so you may need 12 GB of RAM as well. They are also larger WUs and take longer to upload. In return for these requirements we add an additional 20% of points to bigadv Work Units, on top of the Quick Return Bonus awarded to all SMP WUs. We recognize that donors work hard to optimize their setups, but please keep in mind that BA is very much experimental and that future changes not just could happen but most likely will.

Please see the Configuration FAQ for more information on how to get bigadv WUs. The Folding Support Forum is frequented by many hardware experts who may be able to help answer your questions about specific hardware and setups.