Shared BOINC account between projects

Questions and Answers : Getting started : Shared BOINC account between projects
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Message 2010559 - Posted: 3 Sep 2019, 20:12:05 UTC

How do you re-use an existing BOINC account for another project? I tried SETI@home Beta using the same email but ended up with a separate account from my SETI@home Main one.
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Richard Haselgrove Project Donor
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Message 2010568 - Posted: 3 Sep 2019, 22:58:07 UTC - in response to Message 2010559.  

Yes, they are separate projects. SETI and Beta may be closer than most, but in general BOINC projects don't share sensitive data with each other - that could be a security and privacy risk.

If you use the same email address at each new project, the external third-party statistics sites will be able to recognise that the accounts belong to the same user through a hash called the CPID, or 'Cross Project IDentifier'.
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Message 2010650 - Posted: 4 Sep 2019, 16:08:29 UTC - in response to Message 2010568.  

Thank you for your reply. However, although I used the same email address for both projects, the "Cross-project ID" is different between the two accounts. Also unlike your own public page, which lists the credits for all the BOINC projects you contribute to, each of mine doesn't show my stats for the other project. It isn't just the SETI@home and SETI@home Beta accounts that are different, it's also the underlying BOINC accounts themselves.
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Message 2010659 - Posted: 4 Sep 2019, 17:11:56 UTC - in response to Message 2010650.  

OK, there is another possible precondition.

Although there is no direct communication between projects about your account, there is some limited message-passing which occurs when your computer(s) contact each project to request new work or report completed work. This message-passing synchronises the values set on https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/prefs.php?subset=global (so they become truly global), and it also facilitates synchronising the CPID.

For this to work, your computers have to contact more than one project each, so that there is a continuous chain. To illustrate:

This doesn't work
Computer 1 crunches for project A
Computer 2 crunches for project B
Computer 3 crunches for project C
Computer 4 crunches for project D

This works, but slowly
Computer 1 crunches for project A and B
Computer 2 crunches for project B and C
Computer 3 crunches for project C and D
Computer 4 crunches for project D and E

This works more quickly
Computer 1 crunches for project A, B, C, D and E
Computer 2 crunches for project A, B, C, D and E
Computer 3 crunches for project A, B, C, D and E
Computer 4 crunches for project A, B, C, D and E

I've said 'crunches', but that's not strictly required: all that is required is that the computers are attached to the projects, and make periodic contact until everything is synchronised. Obviously, allowing work ensures regular contact, which will speed things up compared with manual use of the 'update' button.
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Message 2016068 - Posted: 20 Oct 2019, 16:50:19 UTC - in response to Message 2010659.  

I'd already tried crunching a bit of s@h beta (my "project A" being s@h main), and have set up regular connections and even some more cruching for a week, but still no luck.

Values on https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/prefs.php?subset=global and https://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/beta/prefs.php?subset=global are not synchronised. Changes I make on one aren't propagated to the other.

The s@h main account ("cross-project" ID bf3703a06c8c91d695e11f7512ce0547) and s@h beta account ("cross-project" ID 67bf2abbeb493056ae45bb5ef3f0f2d1) still aren't linked together, despite both computer 1 and computer 2 being correctly assigned to both projects.

At this point, I give up trying to use boinc for more than a single project. I'll just crunch s@h main and abandon beta. Thanks for trying to help.
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Questions and Answers : Getting started : Shared BOINC account between projects


 
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