Thinking about this, I didn\'t run all that many results over at SETI over the past few days. I think I should probably get in touch with Willy (the guy that runs BOINCstats) and ask exactly what the calculation is for that stat and how much history is involved in the calculation...

Answering my own question:

The credit per cpu second is calculated by each project and is part of the xml stats dump...

That said, here\'s something to think about:

Pending credit is going to influence that figure. What needs to be known now is if any of the pending credit goes into the calculation or if it is only granted credit. Since pending credits tend to linger around far longer at SETI than they do here, the stat could be unfairly penalizing projects with fast turnaround times...

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Thinking about this, I didn\'t run all that many results over at SETI over the past few days. I think I should probably get in touch with Willy (the guy that runs BOINCstats) and ask exactly what the calculation is for that stat and how much history is involved in the calculation...

Answering my own question:

The credit per cpu second is calculated by each project and is part of the xml stats dump...

That said, here\'s something to think about:

Pending credit is going to influence that figure. What needs to be known now is if any of the pending credit goes into the calculation or if it is only granted credit. Since pending credits tend to linger around far longer at SETI than they do here, the stat could be unfairly penalizing projects with fast turnaround times...

I don\'t think that the amount off pending credit is that important.

The question is how is the credit per cpu second made.
Is it based on all credit granted and all seconds used for all hosts or is the caculation based on credit and seconds in a limited period of time.

If the first is the case then a \"old\" project (like SETI) will always show a lower result because when it started computers where a lot slower then today and therefor would have needed a lot more time to process work then is needed today for a equal amount of work.

This comes from the Riesel-Sieve homepage news for those who may be interested in participating :

2008-01-16 00:54:09 UTC BOINC Credit Discussion
Over the last few days, there has been quite a number of discussions regarding the current BOINC credit model, as well as several proposals for new models to follow. While some of the discussion has taken place on the boinc_projects list, many of these discussions have occurred on IRC, multiple project/team/BOINC forums, or personal email. In the interest of time, clarity, and the ability to hear many views in a single arena, the staff of Riesel Sieve and I would like to extend an invitation to a BOINC Credit Community Discussion on Monday, January 21st. This discussion will be held via irc on irc.freenode.net, in the channel #boinc-credit.

In the interest of having the discussion at a time conducive to all, we will be hosting two discussions, at 2pm US Eastern Time and 8pm US Eastern Time. Please consider attending either or both. The logs from each will also be posted on the Riesel Sieve website shortly afterward, to allow those who could not attend the opportunity to review the transcript.

The only way that we can come to a true solution to the crediting situation is through a thorough discussion (or series of discussions) in a real-time format, not over email. Anyone from the BOINC community, including individual users, is invited to attend. Please consider redistributing through your own team channels to encourage attendance.

Hi Guys, very interesting thread. I\'ve just attached to C@H. Until recently, I had all my rigs crunching S@H & admittedly, enjoyed the rise of my rac. I did not join s@h for the rac but the science.

At this moment in time, I cannot access s@h. It\'s not a problem my end as I can access the other 5 projects I\'m attached to. I have found DC to be rewarding in that it helps science to solve problems which benefits us all.

The point I\'ve just found annoying is that Dr A wants to interfere with other projects when the original project cannot get its act together. Since re-attaching to Seti since my original date of 1999, I have found that it is no longer rewarding but frustrating. So much to the point that when my personal rigs have finished crunching the s@h wu\'s, they will be detached. My customers rigs will still be attached as they are more or less \"set & forget\" (on their annual servicing, will update boinc if necessary).

As already mentioned, seti wants more volunteers? Why?, they cannot maintain the project for the current volunteers!

As regards to credit, IMHO it is nice to see how one\'s rigs are doing, but to concentrate on the credit alone is not what these projects are here for.

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At this moment in time, I cannot access s@h. It\'s not a problem my end as I can access the other 5 projects I\'m attached to.

Hard to tell for me. I\'m definitely having local connection problems as I\'m seeing the cable modem lose sync... However, when I have a connection, I\'m not experiencing problems getting to the boards and a scheduler request just now came back in 10 seconds... Dunno...

The point I\'ve just found annoying is that Dr A wants to interfere with other projects when the original project cannot get its act together.

I think it has been obvious that I\'m skeptical of the motives behind his tinkering, but if he wants to tinker, then it needs to be completely fair and equitable. What I brought up about the non-FLOPs supporting BOINC clients dropping SETI\'s average credit is true. People speculate that it is only 0.2% drop or whatever, however the \"luck of the draw\" could make those individuals not get as many as other people. I think it needs to be studied at a project-wide level before dismissing it as statistically insignificant...

As already mentioned, seti wants more volunteers? Why?, they cannot maintain the project for the current volunteers!

I don\'t know either, and not all of us can afford to donate anything other than our computer resources, as we do not have money. I used to have money, but I was slapped with a layoff and unable to find a job in the same field / pay range for the past year. All I can say is I\'m glad people (other volunteers, not the project staff) haven\'t started telling me that I don\'t have a green star (donation), so I shouldn\'t be complaining about things... That\'s happened before over there...

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Although the way this thread is going is by no means offensive or overheated, I kindly ask you to stick to the original subject as lined out by Scott in the first post. It is not much use speculating over the motives of people from outside this project.

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BOINC.BE: For Belgians who love the smell of glowing red cpu's in the morning
Tutta55's Lair

Although the way this thread is going is by no means offensive or overheated, I kindly ask you to stick to the original subject as lined out by Scott in the first post. It is not much use speculating over the motives of people from outside this project.

While I understand your perspective, David Anderson and SETI are indeed driving this discussion, whether you realize it or not. Their credit is now being floated as the \"de facto standard\" and Cosmology\'s credit is \"supposed to be\" (according to David Anderson) calibrated to be granting +/- 20% from their \"baseline\".

One large problem with all of this is that the baseline is likely lower than what it would be if the SETI project itself took control of a long-standing \"issue\" with BOINC, which is the alleged NTLM-proxy issue. Supposedly there is an issue with libcurl that manifested itself in versions of BOINC post-4.72 that \"cause\" some sort of issue where people using NTLM proxies cannot communicate with the projects. As such, even though SETI\'s credit calculation in the science application is designed with flop counting, the BOINC Core Client can\'t report it back until you get up to version 5.2.6 (Windows, at least). SETI is refusing to \"cut people off\", and so they do not have a required minimum version that would make sure that everyone was doing flops instead of benchmark*time.

Additionally, in respect to the minimum version, supposedly BOINC 4.19 was the \"minimum version\" that SETI supposedly enforced, but that too has been broken for quite some time as there are BOINC 3.x versions here and there that are still able to connect and get work. The problem with having the BOINC 3.x versions submit work is even more detrimental to credit, as they claim ZERO (0) credits. Since SETI\'s credit will grant the lower of the two claims, your only prayer of not getting a big goosegg (0) if you get paired with a 3.x BOINC client is that your result is not strongly similar and it has to be issued to a 3rd computer, thus the low score gets dropped.

Various individual volunteers over there will postulate that these issues happen infrequently enough so as to be effectively statistically insignificant.

I question that...

Furthermore, if the flop-counting is the \"standard\" method for calculating credits, that \"standard\" means that my claims there are \"standard\" there, as I use BOINC 5.8.16, and if I get paired with a non-flop compliant BOINC version, I generally get 50% or less of the \"standard\" claim, then internally in their own project they are guilty of violating their own supposed \"standard\", as -50% is outside of the normalization range of -20% to +20%...

Their own house needs to be in order before preaching to other projects...

Beyond that, there\'s the discussion of what should be the \"standard\" there, the official application compiled by official project staff, or the optimized application compiled by volunteers (SETI is open source). The optimized application already has 20% or so boost over the vanilla application in many cases... So, does that mean that the \"standard\" becomes only the official application and thus any and all open source efforts must be forced to just not improve the application any further than 20% above the stock application?

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Although the way this thread is going is by no means offensive or overheated, I kindly ask you to stick to the original subject as lined out by Scott in the first post. It is not much use speculating over the motives of people from outside this project.

While I understand your perspective, David Anderson and SETI are indeed driving this discussion, whether you realize it or not. Their credit is now being floated as the \"de facto standard\" and Cosmology\'s credit is \"supposed to be\" (according to David Anderson) calibrated to be granting +/- 20% from their \"baseline\".

I agree with that, and also with adding these elements to the discussion. However, it is not on topic in this thread to comment on the way other projects are run or should be run. So I kindly ask for the second time to refrain from doing that.

David Anderson is not from SETI@home - he is the BOINC-father. There is a difference. SETI is simply another BOINC project.

David Anderson is driving this current discussion of BOINC-wide credit granting. He has specifically targeted Cosmology@Home as being out of compliance with what he feels is correct levels of credit granting.

It will be impossible to continue this discussion if it is not allowed to discuss credit BOINC-wide. Either Cosmology@home is part of the BOINC community, or it is not.

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David Anderson is not from SETI@home - he is the BOINC-father. There is a difference. SETI is simply another BOINC project.

David Anderson is driving this current discussion of BOINC-wide credit granting. He has specifically targeted Cosmology@Home as being out of compliance with what he feels is correct levels of credit granting.

It will be impossible to continue this discussion if it is not allowed to discuss credit BOINC-wide. Either Cosmology@home is part of the BOINC community, or it is not.

Having a full blown discussion of Seti here is not going to help determine anything about C@H credit.The real purpose of this thread. These need to be taken to the Seti boards.

David Anderson is not from SETI@home - he is the BOINC-father. There is a difference. SETI is simply another BOINC project.

David Anderson is driving this current discussion of BOINC-wide credit granting. He has specifically targeted Cosmology@Home as being out of compliance with what he feels is correct levels of credit granting.

It will be impossible to continue this discussion if it is not allowed to discuss credit BOINC-wide. Either Cosmology@home is part of the BOINC community, or it is not.

Having a full blown discussion of Seti here is not going to help determine anything about C@H credit.The real purpose of this thread. These need to be taken to the Seti boards.

Perhaps not full-blown, but some information regarding credit claiming and granting over there is now relevant because its\' model is (supposedly) now this project\'s new target to achieve, within 20%...

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I think the current state of the discussion is mostly fine, since we are being asked to change our credit to be more in line with other projects.

As long as the discussion stays strictly about credits and not about, say, how well other projects are being run, then this is fine.

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Scott Kruger
Project Administrator, Cosmology@Home

I think the current state of the discussion is fine, since we are being asked to change our credit to be more in line with other projects.

At what level do you feel this project is at? Do you feel it is still \"beta\"? Would you go for \"advanced beta\"? Personally, other than the issue with the progress indicator going buh-bye and starting over, I haven\'t had an issue here on either of my systems... However, that\'s not to say that there aren\'t problems out there. One of the \"rewards\" to entice people to test should be, IMO, a somewhat higher amount of credit because of the potential for getting no credit, like what happened over in the \"unfair outcome\" thread...

Personally, I think David Anderson is overreacting to 4 projects: yours, QMC, RieselSieve, and yoyo. In my opinion, he was/is more concerned about \"too many\" credits being issued than \"too few\".

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David Anderson is not from SETI@home - he is the BOINC-father.

As Seti director, he is both. See Seti Project Personnel, first person in the list.

For the rest of the discussion, I\'m staying out of it.

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I think the current state of the discussion is fine, since we are being asked to change our credit to be more in line with other projects.

As long as this says civil, I don\'t see a problem with continuing.

1st, many thanks Scott. 2nd, My apologies, I did not intend to cause the thread to go off topic. I genuinely admire & appreciate the way Admin & Moderators work these boards. It really is a sheer pleasure to witness.

I\'ve stopped crunching Seti on my personal rigs due to the problems at S@H. Too many times I\'ve seen the servers down, questions unanswered. At the end of the day, any DC Project cannot survive without it\'s volunteers. The majority of which enjoy doing so, not only for the science, credits, but also for what they themselves can learn.

You are rewarding your volunteers with what you consider to be a reasonable amount. I believe most accept this, but what I find hard to accept is that yours & other projects must fall into line with S@H. This is wrong, for scientists & so called professionals, they are going about things the wrong way. Since re-joining S@H for the first time since Summer 1999, asides from the regular server maintainence outage, they continue to lose they servers on a regular basis.

My personal view is that until they get their act together, they should not be setting standards for others.

At this moment in time, I think that they are in the \"Chicken & Egg\" situation. Which comes 1st, the project or the crunchers?

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I edited my above post, but to reiterate, you can discuss credits in other projects and how they relate to our own, but please stay away from talking about how poorly/well other projects are run and such.

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Scott Kruger
Project Administrator, Cosmology@Home

I edited my above post, but to reiterate, you can discuss credits in other projects and how they relate to our own, but please stay away from talking about how poorly/well other projects are run and such.

Okay.

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DA is comparing credits \"per CPU second\" here against a standard (S@H).

We know that credits here are a bit high, to offset for failed results, with the idea that everything will average out. Thus freeing up Scott from having to manually fix credits of those failed credits.

Question: Does that master comparison table include the failed results with zero credits? Or is it counting only the successful results with credits? If the latter, then it is overstating the actual credits, because it is not taking into account the wasted crunching time that occasionally happens.

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Dublin, CA
Team SETI.USA

DA is comparing credits \"per CPU second\" here against a standard (S@H).

We know that credits here are a bit high, to offset for failed results, with the idea that everything will average out. Thus freeing up Scott from having to manually fix credits of those failed credits.

Question: Does that master comparison table include the failed results with zero credits? Or is it counting only the successful results with credits? If the latter, then it is overstating the actual credits, because it is not taking into account the wasted crunching time that occasionally happens.

Good question, however that would be the case for all projects, so I would think it would balance out depending on the level of alpha/beta and/or error rates in general. This is why I asked Scott what his opinion was on what level he felt this project was at...

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DA is comparing credits \"per CPU second\" here against a standard (S@H).

We know that credits here are a bit high, to offset for failed results, with the idea that everything will average out. Thus freeing up Scott from having to manually fix credits of those failed credits.

Question: Does that master comparison table include the failed results with zero credits? Or is it counting only the successful results with credits? If the latter, then it is overstating the actual credits, because it is not taking into account the wasted crunching time that occasionally happens.

Good question, however that would be the case for all projects, so I would think it would balance out depending on the level of alpha/beta and/or error rates in general. This is why I asked Scott what his opinion was on what level he felt this project was at...

You can tell by the various issues that crop up and the lack of a mac app where we are at...as the sign says BETA (middle)