This is truly something I thought I'd never see.

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This is truly something I thought I'd never see.

Good on them for taking action... everything should be even and fair!

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- Luke.

Good on them for taking action... everything should be even and fair!

Luke--shouldn't different project managers be able to run their projects as they wish? I think so

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Good on them for taking action... everything should be even and fair!

Luke--shouldn't different project managers be able to run their projects as they wish? I think so

Wouldn't that cause bias towards one project?

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- Luke.

This is truly something I thought I'd never see.

It only happened after MW dropped their awarded credits to be in line with other projects upon consultation with Dr. A.

I think the problem is the optimized crowd thinks that they should get more credits for doing the same work faster. The key words are "same work." Their only advantage is they can crunch more w/u's in the same time as the stock app. That small fraction should be their advantage.

I think the honest problem is MW doesn't know how much work is in each of their W/U's. That is a good reason to boycott.

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With all due respect to DA, I believe that although they do use Boinc, project managers should have the right to assign credit as they see fit. Example--Milkyway is owned by RPI (Rennsalaer Polytechnical Institute) not DA. Why should he have the right to control their credit granted?

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WHAT.....ever.......

You don't see me racing over to MW just because they might proffer more credits/hour for my cpu time.........

That's not what it is about folks........

I am at Seti because I believe in Seti....

As it should be.......

It just doesn't matter......because no matter if Seti cut the credits in half, I would still be on equal footing with all other Seti crunchers.......

So the other projects can offer what they may........if they awarded 10 times what Seti does.....I wouldn't go there. Simple enough........go where your heart leads you.....my credits here are important to me.....they gauge what I do for the project and compare me against others here.....not against any other project.......

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

WHAT.....ever.......

You don't see me racing over to MW just because they might proffer more credits/hour for my cpu time.........

That's not what it is about folks........

I am at Seti because I believe in Seti....

As it should be.......

It just doesn't matter......because no matter if Seti cut the credits in half, I would still be on equal footing with all other Seti crunchers.......

So the other projects can offer what they may........if they awarded 10 times what Seti does.....I wouldn't go there. Simple enough........go where your heart leads you.....my credits here are important to me.....they gauge what I do for the project and compare me against others here.....not against any other project.......

Very true. That's why you don't see me crunching anything other than SETI. Because I give it my full faith. Credit is just a simple incentive, but if overused, it could become biased and favorable for projects if they use it just to catch members, I believe credit should be awarded fairly across all of BOINC, and if not, how do you a get an idea or tally on how much work you or someone else have done across different projects, so "all-project stats" gets rendered null and pointless.

Again, I'm not saying SETI is greater over any other project, it's where your heart leads you to.

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- Luke.

With all due respect to DA, I believe that although they do use Boinc, project managers should have the right to assign credit as they see fit. Example--Milkyway is owned by RPI (Rennsalaer Polytechnical Institute) not DA. Why should he have the right to control their credit granted?

Because as long as they use the framework provided by Dr. A, they should follows the guidelines that go along with it. If they don't want to follow along, they can always break away from the BOINC framework and develop their own app...

Indeed -- here's hoping applications get recoded so as not to punish us AMD crunchers.

I've been backing off MilkyWay over the past 10 days -- and expect that to continue quite a lot further over the next week, having added the POEM project as well as revising resource share down on Milkyway and up on SETI. Two weeks ago my 7 day average credit split had a whopping 84% coming from MilkyWay, at the moment, it is still too high about 55% of the 7 day total, and I expect it to drop further (say to 40% or less within the next two weeks) -- The MilkyWay current credit handling scheme is more than a bit bizarre -- that is, for folks with old slow systems, the credits awarded are VERY HIGH.



The current scheme there is a 'maximum credit per hour' rate which one can hit with a 2Ghz processor, and if you are running anything faster and complete more work than that, you get the same total hourly credit. Really a bad scheme.

The good news is that in the next week, they will have a new application out and will (so they say) be adjusting the credits offered to be closer in sync with SETI (perhaps in sync with SETI optimized -- which 'unfair as it may seem' yields more credit per cycle the standard SETI application.

This is truly something I thought I'd never see.

Good on them for taking action... everything should be even and fair!

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Hmm, is there an optimized application for SETI -- that would be a yes. The optimized application for MilkyWay is available for public download, just like the SETI optimized application. I use both. The difference with MilkyWay is the optimized application is a LOT faster (50+ to 1) than the 'standard' application. It produces the same results though (just like the SETI optimized application does).

But you have VERY good point regarding the arbitrary award scheme they are working with in large part because they don't have a handle on how much actual work is done in a given work unit. That results in some bizarre credit award issues (see my earlier post in this thread).

The thing is, the credit awards there have been 'rich' from day one -- which attracted folks (even before the optimized application was developed and used by a very small group resulting in off the chart credits). But now, if you run the optimized application and run it on a *slow* computer (say a P3 or AMD XP 2000 or slower) you can get the SAME total daily credit as someone running FAST CPU). Talk about arbitrary. Actually, a fast quad cpu probably gets a credit per CPU cycle value not far off from the SETI optimized app on the same system -- at least at the moment -- their credit award scheme will change with a new standard application release in the next 10 days -- though I don't know that scheme will be any less arbitary (sigh).

I think the problem is the optimized crowd thinks that they should get more credits for doing the same work faster. The key words are "same work." Their only advantage is they can crunch more w/u's in the same time as the stock app. That small fraction should be their advantage.

I think the honest problem is MW doesn't know how much work is in each of their W/U's. That is a good reason to boycott.

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I think it's that time of the month.....Here we go again.....ha!

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I thought the purpose of Boinc was to encourage researchers to build their own project & to use it's resources. It's been stated that only 10% of volunteers are active on the forums.

What I'd like to know is how many of the set & forget just crunch one project - for example, are all the set & forget just crunching seti or are there set & forget for other projects?

Secondly, what percentage of crunchers use optimised apps? how many crunchers are there like myself - not using opp apps & just crunching on the projects they like?

Personally, I'd like Dr A & ALL project leaders to hold a test - A month/3 months, NO opp apps allowed & all projects awarding 1 credit per wu!

How many of the credit whores will scream B****y murder & how many of the volunteers just continue to crunch away? Interesting test, What!

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I think Barry would stay :-)

SETI@home classic workunits 168,000
SETI@home classic CPU time 905,547 hours

As may be bount.hunter, Ozzfan and me too ( once and a while).:-)

Thats the difference. My Team does not worry about credits. We only crunch for a few projects, which are worth to crunch.

Credits are nice, but not all.

If a Team worries about credits, you can see what happens. Only trouble.

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At QMC the top computer, an 8 core Xeon running Linux, gets 600 credits for WUs that he crunches apparently in a few seconds. But he is using a very old BOINC core client and I believe his times are wrong. He also gets many compute errors.
tullio

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I only loosely followed the latest troubles over at MilkyWay, but I think all this has to do with the optimized Clients and what was found in the original Code.

From all I've heared :

- original code is terrible and doen't even make sense in many segments
- wastes a massive time on repeated calculations for no reason

After the optimized Clients were done, speedups were in the region of like factor 50 and above.

Given all the details, the Maintainers of MW for unknown reasons (to me) failed to correct the problem; comments from involved Users sound like they didn't even try.

Instead of freely distributing the Optimized Client, it was held back (rightfully fearing cheaters would ruin the project) and available only to a few.
A cheap Dual Core CPU could easily run at >50000 RAC and above!
Only a handful was kept running as a silent protest against the terrible codebase, pending correction by MW staff.

After months long discussions, the User base of several larger teams apparently now voted to boycott the project, as its staff repeatedly failed to correct the known problem.

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At least that's how I recall the recent history of MW, others will likely have more details.
Apart from that, MW was already attracting 'credit whores' with its Default Client due to its apparently well-above Crediting.

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IMHO in a perfect world, every project's Default Clients should indeed strive to give equal credit when being run on the same Host. Some slack is natural but shouldn't exceed certain unwritten limits.
Otherwise, we'd see (and already have seen) individual projects with low TFlops count outrunning Projects that actually have far more active power but give fair credit. (just see BOINCstats global stats table and you'll easily spot them)

From my experience, it's plain unfair across Projects and across Users to create "Credit Magnets". It takes away credibility of global crediting, destroys cross-project comparability of work done and rightfully ticks off people who work competitively for fair credit and are overtaken by cheaters (either project's intention or neglect; or individuals exploiting them on purpose).

As little effect Credits have for actual science (merely yield a more or less accurate TFlops count), its impact on the userbase must not be underestimated. Without an intact base, the entire BOINC infrastructure built upon it is put on the line.

Remember it's effectively not the Hosts (Hardware) that gets the job done here in the first place, it's the socially active Userbase of people that installs BOINC and let certain projects run on them - coming with all human side-effects and social requirements. The need for "fair play" is only one of many that need to be satisfied.

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As little effect Credits have for actual science (merely yield a more or less accurate TFlops count), its impact on the userbase must not be underestimated. Without an intact base, the entire BOINC infrastructure built upon it is put on the line.

That maybe true, but this credit C*** has already caused problems. Nick Petersen, the Project leader of Ramsey@Home has shut down his project & on restarting some time in December, will not be using credits, but if he does, it will be something like 1 credit per wu.

From what I have seen on the forum, there will be many returning regardless of the credit awards & that includes my farm! I swap projects once a month & when it comes round to Ramsey, It will get crunched by the whole farm regardless of lack of credit.

This whole credit agenda is Pandora's Box & as far as I'm concerned, the projects provide an interest in a specific matter & it is down to the individual whether or not to crunch it. IT IS NOT down to that individual to dictate to the Project leaders on how they run that project!

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(ears burning) -- yes I would -- been here for over 8 and a half years.

The thing about boycotting a project -- perhaps a bit over the top.

Should folks boycott a project that regularly has a 6 hour weekly outage followed by a 6 to 24 hour recovery phase?

Should folks boycott a project that has both a standard application and - for those who search, optimized applications requiring a small amount of installation tweaking?

Should folks boycott a project who's application is designed in a way that it provides a higher credit to Intel CPU's over AMD CPU's?

Should folks boycott a project which *frequently* encounters upload and download problems?

Should folks boycott a project which periodically sends out work units which go into black hole mode losing hours of CPU cycles to 0% complete?

Perhaps some folks should, but I'm still around here in spite of these very real scenarios which affect, yup, you guessed it -- the SETI project.

By the way, as to the argument that SETI has limited resources as an explanation for its various 'foibles' -- consider MilkyWAy -- talk about limited resources.

By the way, I'm not defending MilkyWay's current credit scheme, it is the sort of the thing politicians might gin up in a bill that none of them bothered to read.

I think Barry would stay :-)

SETI@home classic workunits 168,000
SETI@home classic CPU time 905,547 hours

As may be bount.hunter, Ozzfan and me too ( once and a while).:-)

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I'm going to say something here that may upset a few and it is from the MilkyWay@Home project home page.
This particular project is being developed to better understand the power of volunteer computer resources.
I believe all this controversy over credits and the inefficiency in the stock application is and continues to be intentional. I'm not convinced the project was created to do astronomical science. The papers cited on the home page are all about computer projects, not about galaxy modeling. The project is being run by their computer science department not their astronomy department. I think the thing being studied is called BOINC. I think one of the things being studied is how credit awarding effects the computing power given to a project.

I hope there never comes a market place for buying and selling cobblestones, but if the credit disparities aren't put down, someone is going to invent one.

Just my opinion.

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