I would like to express my view about the periodic benchmarking and the credit system. I wrote this message with the hope it could help the project to reach its goals.
In my humble opinion a good credit system is important as well the science algorithms for a simple reason: a great number of users (majority) keep heavily crunching for competitive reasons. Even the opinion of "less competitive spirit" users about the fairness of the system is _very_ important.
If the fairness is "felt" weak, than the computing efficiency will be lower.
Just imagine what happens when in a state the currency heavily looses its value: even the economy (factories, shops, etc) collapses. As a "currency", credits are the guarantors of the system.
This point was the true force of the seti@home "classic" project.
The periodic benchmarking suffers several intrinsic problems: above of all the benchmark requires to be executed within idle pc time in order to be precise. Due this issue the same pc can give quite differents results over the time.
The benchmark it has also to be optimized for every platform, etc.
Here is my little suggestion: within every single WU is there a deterministic computing fraction? (a small part that requires even the same workload in order to be computed)
Yes, is there. (it isn't?)
So what about using it in order to valutate the non-deterministic part of the WU?
Does the development team already considered this way?
Copyright © 2024 Einstein@Home. All rights reserved.
Credits: guarantors of the system
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The BOINC team has made provision for projects that may want to use this style of credit claiming. There are hooks where the application can pass the flops or the claimed credit directly to the BOINC client and skip the benchmark interaction entirely. As far as I know none of the projects use this as yet.
Sorry I could not find any more details for the developers to look at right now.
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BOINCing since 2002/12/8