slower CPU = more credit?

Quote:

I've been watching my credit lately pretty closely, and I'm puzzled with what is a pattern. Often my 1.6 gig pent. M outperforms my 3.2 gig P4 in credits per day/week. Is there really a tear appering in the space-time continuum or am I just being a dufuss?

Gerry Rough

With the 3-result quorum on Albert, plus the preference for issue of new results to your computer which use the same 7 Megabyte large data file already downloaded, your quorum buddies are very poorly randomized over the short term. I'm not talking about the multi-week settling time of the RAC computation, which is a separate issue.

If you start processing a a large datafile which happens to have a few low-claiming high processing capacity folks, they can push your score down for a weeks, and vice versa. I've seen this on my own small and motley fleet. Two old machines which have closely comparable processors differing by about 15% in real compute capability had Einstein cobblestone production differing by almost a factor of two for weeks because of luck of the work-unit draw.

I also have a 1.4 GHz Pentium M and a 3.2 GHz large-cache P4 (the 2Megabyte cache flavor). My P4 slaughters my M, getting over double the Einstein RAC as adjusted for resource share as compared to the M. I do run hyperthreaded nearly all the time. I also run a bit of SETI. So long as I keep the resource share below about 15%, nearly all the P4 SETI runs opposite an Einstein@home job, which gives startlingly low SETI execution times (about CPU 45 minutes for a nominal result). The M's one thread gives SETI nominal WU times of about 57 minutes, so is well under half as SETI-productive in this case, rising to almost two-thirds as productive in an all-SETI scenario) A small-cache P4 won't do nearly so well as mine on HT SETI, but the more extreme claims for P4 deficiency in numeric computing are ill-founded. Its power consumption, on the other hand, is justly maligned.

Also, my impression is that Einstein@home is not so abruptly sensitive to cache sizes in the .25 to 2 Megabyte/process range as is SETI@home. If you are not running HT, you may wish to try it.