LHC@home

The current method is lesser of two claimed amounts.

Can this please be changed to average of the two?

Yes, I understand that can lead to slight abuse by a few. But I feel that is better than short-changing by so much, many of the volunteers who are frequently being under-awarded.

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Dublin, California
Team: SETI.USA

I very much agree!

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Also LHC scoring is very low, for example:

Task ID
click for details 	Computer 	Sent 	Time reported
or deadline
explain 	Status 	Run time
(sec) 	CPU time
(sec) 	Claimed credit 	Granted credit 	Application
186221 	9929870 	18 Sep 2011 17:57:36 UTC 	18 Sep 2011 21:27:39 UTC 	Completed and validated 	6,227.83 	5,417.91 	28.68 	28.68 	SixTrack v530.08

188.9s/1 credit

Status 	Run time (sec) 	CPU time (sec) 	Stwórz 	Aplikacje
Completed and validated 	1,813.98 	1,646.33 	17.38 	PPS (LLR) v6.09

only 94.7s/1 credit, so in 188.9s it will give 2 credits

Credit is way too low, I am getting under 10 credits per hour on this project. I just had an over 17 hour WU give back just 137 points, less than 8 cr/h.

Can the credit system be looked at please, as per Zombie67's first post.

Conan

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I have to ask what method is being used ? Is this the creditnew system ?

I did a comparision, using malariacontrol for an example, becuase over the years they get asked a lot to raise credit, and insist they use the boinc supplied formula. Point being everyone thinks they are low.

This is a rough estimate, but i compared the last 20 results i turned in there and here. I divided the credit granted by the cpu time in seconds

malariacontrol average for 20 results is .008771 credit per second

LHC average for 20 results is .004244 credit per second

I have to agree that credit here is very low.

I think that the credits given out by this project always have been low. But since until recently the amount of work given out was so meager, it was never really looked at. I was just glad to get anything at all. But now that the project has been aroused from its semi comatose state and is pumping out work fairly regularly, the credit system should be reviewed. Especially now that they are handing out some of the work units that use a considerable amount of resources to crunch. Getting low points for a work unit that took 6 seconds to crunch is not a great concern. But now I am getting WU's that take 8 to 10 hours and only paying out half or less of what most other projects give for the same time.

I don't want to seem ungrateful. I am very glad that this worthwhile project is getting back on its feet again. I'm sure there is a long list of things to fix after the long period of neglect. This is just one more item for the growing "to do" list I guess.

Wes

To be clear, I am *not* asking for credits to be increased in this thread. That is a separate discussion, and I don't want this discussion to get derailed.

I am asking about the method for awarding credits. With a quorum of 2, there are two "normal" methods that projects use: 1) Awarding the lesser of the two claimed amounts. 2) The average of the two claimed amounts.

I am asking to change from #1 to #2.

Thanks!

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Dublin, California
Team: SETI.USA

Thanks for pointing this out. I consider it vital that I
look at it as soon as possible with my colleagues.

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based on this discussion we have changed the algorithm of awarding credits.
It is based on average now. Please, monitor and tell us if the change is
visible and if it is indeed the right method.

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skype id: igor-zacharov

Thanks!!

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Dublin, California
Team: SETI.USA

Please, monitor and tell us if the change is visible and if it is indeed the right method.

RU
Такой метод с одной стороны приветствуется, но с другой - появляется опасность читерских атак. Обрабатывая последние пакеты из Лондона, я столкнулся с фактами особенно грязной игры, когда компьютер некого анонима запрашивал приблизительно в 100 раз завышенные кредиты, т.е. я заметил, что вместо где-то 5 кредитов оба компьютера (читерский и мой) получили по 250. Раз такое было, значит, может повториться и в результате привести к хаосу в статистике проекта.
EN
This method is welcome, but it may provoke cheating. I saw here some hosts (of anonymous participants, of course) claiming enormous credits. After several successful attacks the cheaters may strike again.

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Yes have noticed the last few I have returned are now averaging the two results.
Thanks for doing that, will keep monitoring and see how it goes.

Conan

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Hello,

http://lhcathomeclassic.cern.ch/sixtrack/workunit.php?wuid=157889

It's peanuts, but I see more of this very small changes.
Averrage credit should be: 0.24
So loosing 0.02 credits, but that with a few hundreds a day...

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Greetings from,
TJ

My machine shows a crunch time of eight hours. WU shows time 2,299.90 sec, 39 minutes. Claimed credit 9.85??????????????
DNetC, WU 27706407. Time 5,214. Claimed credit 59.59. Note, this project is showing actual time taken to compute while LHC is way off.
Decide for yourself as to who will waste their expensive energy charges and expensive machines for this?
I know we cant eat the credit so i dont want a smart comment. I just want you people to use your common sence. Nothing more. You want crunchers?
Hello Zombie 67.

Decide for yourself as to who will waste their expensive energy charges and expensive machines for this?

I intend to leave my expensive i7 Sandybridge here and I don't think it's a waste of anything. If they develop a CUDA app I will feed Sixtrack tasks to my expensive Nvidia GTX 570 and I won't consider that a waste either. Apparently a lot of other crunchers feel the same as I do. BTW, you CAN eat the credits, thought you knew. Go to the front page, click Certificate, print the page, shred the page into a bowl, add milk and brown sugar and.. Yum Yum. Try slicing some fruit into the bowl for variety. I eat mine for breakfast every day.

Decide for yourself as to who will waste their expensive energy charges and expensive machines for this?

Since you have no problem running an old Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 1.70GHz, a Pentium(r) II Processor, a couple of Pentium 4s all with HT, and an i5 with a ATI Radeon HD 5x00 series (Redwood) (1024MB) GPU, one would expect that you don't care about your electricity bill.

For if you did, you would:
a) shut down all those old machines that burn electrons more than they do work.
b) not run any work on a GPU, as that'll increase your electricity bill at least ten fold.
c) not run work on that many M (mobile) processors. Don't you know that laptops and notebooks eat more electrons per capita when doing BOINC than desktops do? Plus their cooling sucks.

Now then, things that make you go oooh. Your benchmarks on that i5 are way too low, even when it is a mobile. The machine was probably doing something CPU intensive when you allowed BOINC to make the benchmarks, or there's something else going on.

Your numbers in August:
Measured floating point speed 2281.02 million ops/sec
Measured integer speed 7232.77 million ops/sec

Now, for comparison, I have an i3, which has been doing these numbers quite consequently. My numbers should be lower than yours. My machine is not overclocked or anything. My numbers:
Measured floating point speed 2626.4 million ops/sec
Measured integer speed 9187.57 million ops/sec

That you claim too little for your perception is a cause of your low benchmarks.

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Jord

BOINC FAQ Service

... That you claim too little for your perception is a cause of your low benchmarks.

Claimed credits are not benchmark based here, you can easily see that just before you report. Example :

Calculated credits 214 (BoincView shows that value, it is benchmark based)
Claimed credits 151 (that's what the project application reports)
Granted credits 144 (this is the average of two claimed values)

Some projects claim without using the benchmarks, like Spinhenge and Einstein.

I'm not talking about granting fixed credits, I think it's rather a FlOps counting thing that is used for those claims.

As the claimed value is not based on the benchmark values, cheating should not be too easy btw.

... That you claim too little for your perception is a cause of your low benchmarks.

Claimed credits are not benchmark based here

This project uses CreditNew for calculating the credit awards. The calculation is not based entirely on the benchmarks like it once was but the benchmarks are still used in the calculation according to the documentation at that link.

Cheating is very easy with the current implementation of CreditNew. I know because I've done it here and at two other projects using CreditNew.