Hello everybody,

may be someone could answer me one question.
What can i do with the credits i get for calculating the tasks? Are they only for the ranking?

Best Greetings

Daniel

What can be done with them ?
not a lot,
Though we get as many of them as possible,
Because this softens the blow of the arrival of the electricity bill,
They are only for the ranking,
just for comparissen between different machines,
a `thank you` from the projects
a bit of fun, though we do sometimes have a bit of `fun` with them. . . . ;)

I just completed a 18.5 hr. w.u. for a measly 420 credits. That's not how you entice people to stay.

I just completed a 18.5 hr. w.u. for a measly 420 credits.

Doesn't sound too bad to me - your computers are hidden so we can't compare your results but bear in mind that different units take different times to complete and (in my experience) there can be around a 3:1 ratio in time between the longest and the shortest.
It would be interesting to know what your average "credits per hour" comes to (including the shorter ones), what you consider to be a fair return for your computer's labour, and how that compares with what you are getting on other projects.
And what you are doing with all these credits when you've got them!

At least you are getting units to crunch - my P4 is effectively excluded from participating because of the inordinately high memory requirements.

I just completed a 18.5 hr. w.u. for a measly 420 credits. That's not how you entice people to stay.

How does that compare to the amount of credit claimed?

Hi, I am running an AMD Phenom 2 940 clocked at 3.3ghz and at Aqua@home I did a 33hrs. w.u. and got 1,671 credits. And in Jan. at Cosmology@home I did 1 w.u. for 5 or 6 hours and got 5,120 credits. So figure that one out.

Thank you.

And in Jan. at Cosmology@home I did 1 w.u. for 5 or 6 hours and got 5,120 credits

To be correct, you would have received 140 credits for your 5 or 6 hours in January for any completed w.u., plus 5000 "bonus" points simply for having an account in April. So the 420 credits for 18.5 hours last week is very much in line. (Current units take 3 to 4 times longer than before April)
Add a further 140 credits, for another unit presumably completed between January and April, and the grand total is the 5700 stated in your information panel.
You have nothing to worry about.

I have being looking at my total stats on my 11 projects for the last 7 days on the boinc stats and see my daily credits have been 2477 2420 1725 2514 1598 1753 and 1894 so I have had 14381 credits in a week averaging at 2010 every 24 hours
I have one task for Cosmology running at the moment and has been running for 23 hours and 36 minutes is 93.685% and I get 420 credits for this.

So I have received 840 from Cosmology for 48 hours processing on one CPU against the 48 hour average of the other projects which is 3180 on the 2nd cpu

yesterdays 2477 did not include any cosmolgy figures

Paul

I have being looking at my total stats on my 11 projects for the last 7 days on the boinc stats and see my daily credits have been 2477 2420 1725 2514 1598 1753 and 1894 so I have had 14381 credits in a week averaging at 2010 every 24 hours
I have one task for Cosmology running at the moment and has been running for 23 hours and 36 minutes is 93.685% and I get 420 credits for this.

So I have received 840 from Cosmology for 48 hours processing on one CPU against the 48 hour average of the other projects which is 3180 on the 2nd cpu

yesterdays 2477 did not include any cosmolgy figures

Paul

I think I get what you are saying . .
You are concerned that the credit return for your work with Cosmology is not up to the rest of your projects?
A few comments and questions:
Does your Cosmology get 50% of your processing resources? I don't think it does.
Judging from the stats I see, you have recently (about 2 weeks ago) substantially increased the proportion of your computer's efforts to processing Milky Way units such that most of your credits are now derived from this project and Cosmology is now a minor part of your "portfolio".
Now you may have discovered that MW provides a better rate of return but it is not fair to compare Cosmology with a collection of projects which is biased towards one which gives a high credit per hour figure. Your observations may be less a criticism of Cosmology (for giving a low return) and more an observation that another project is giving an inordinately high return.
Rather, compare your returns from Cosmology with, say, Climate prediction or Seti or one of the other more established projects and see how they match up.
I don't think 840 credits (420 x 2 cores) a day is too bad a return for your machine - even if you were running Cosmology full time.
Let's have some information based on individual projects.

Rather, compare your returns from Cosmology with, say, Climate prediction or Seti

The 3 tasks that are showing for their system as of right now have an average cr/hr of 21.77. That rate would in all likelihood be surpassed by Einstein or SETI. In fact, if you follow the BOINCStats link to compare the host, Einstein's Credit Per CPU Second value is slightly higher. SETI may require the use of the 3rd party optimized application to get there, but that is still a valid ocmparison to Einstein because Einstein's app that would run on that system is SSE2 optimized.

420/workunit here is a bit low, not only because other "established" projects give higher returns, but because of the extremely high resource consumption in terms of memory usage and said usage's inevitable system-wide performance strain on the host on which the task is being processed. It is because of that strain of the high memory usage that I am no longer participating in this project with my Pentium 4 2.4GHz with 1GB of memory. The computer simply cannot handle its' normal usage with the current load of CAMB 2.16 without significant slowdown in system-wide performance...

500-550 is the range that I have thought is "fair", but that likely will bring out the people who believe that is "too much"...

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I have just returned after some urging. I find my single 3.0ghz P4 Prescott (hyperthreaded) with 2 gigs of ram takes 40 n to 50 hours per work unit for 200 credits. I used to get 140 credits for 6-8 hourd per work unit on the same machine and Boinc App. Sience may be important but so is the competition. I am not eveen goint to try my other computers on it at present. Seems to me you are progressing in the wrong direction. So I will again retire my computers and as the president says so well SAVE ENERGY. I can amagine what the other volunteers are not saying.

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. . . I find my single 3.0ghz P4 Prescott (hyperthreaded) with 2 gigs of ram takes 40 n to 50 hours per work unit for 200 credits. I used to get 140 credits for 6-8 hourd per work unit on the same machine. . .

I've just checked, since you have a similar setup to myself. Your unit processed actually received (the normal) 420 credits.
That's not a lot per hour for that one (although comparable with some other Boinc projects), but to make decisions on the basis of a single result may be regarded as premature - I suggest you try a few more units since the time taken per unit is somewhat variable and 40 to 50 hours looks to be on the high end of the distribution.

... single 3.0ghz P4 Prescott (hyperthreaded) with 2 gigs of ram takes 40 n to 50 hours per work unit ...

Is this just what it estimates or has this already happened?

The runtimes are a bit volatile, some run 8 hours and some run 15 hours on my OC'ed Q9550.

Hyperthreaded CPUs often have a better overall throughput when they get loaded with two different types of WUs, i.e. instead of running project A for a while and then project B for a while, running them 50/50 usually has a better effect on those CPUs.

oops ... I just see that I replied to an ancient thread, sorry

oops ... I just see that I replied to an ancient thread, sorry

Well, it's still relevant due to the person you replied to has 9 tasks that will timeout tomorrow, giving 27 (or 36?) more instances of download errors...but hey, everything's coming up roses....

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Credits for credit sake seems a bit banal....can't we come up with some interesting "rewards" to link them to?

Some ideas...

Maybe link them to greater access to project information/interaction? - maybe a "premium" section of the website. (Every month while paying the electricity bill I will wonder where the "tangible" benefit is to my participation)

The project team could negotiate with a Sponsor to convert them to some-other type of online or real life credit.

While I don't advocate trying to convert credits to $$ I do wonder what is the point of credits if they are never translated into a meaningful product.

Cheers
Skiwi

It's come up in this thread a little, along with the long thread on credits which is now locked (and kinda needs to stop growing if threads can't be broken into seperate pages, given that it's already difficult to load really long ones on dialup connections).

Anyhow, with all the comparison of this project vs. that one, and talk of credit parities; crunch time is not the only resource a project can be taking. RAM allocation size is also a resource that can be taken up, and as I remember (I have to go from memory, as cosmology won't let me download a WU now, given the giving up on download, file not found errors), Cosmology was showing a much higher memory size allocation for it's thread (via inspection in Task Manager), then other projects. I'm talking over 100 MB. The actual commit charge on the machine when it loaded, actually went up a fair bit (more like 200-300 MB before and after process loading by BOINC), and considering 1 GB of RAM (which is admittedly a little low these days), represented a fair chunk of RAM. Given the OS was taking about 300 MB, along with AV software and drivers, we're talking over half the RAM pool in this case.

Not a complaint, or anything of the sort; but the higher credit vs some projects, really did seem fair compensation considering the RAM utilization element, especially where some resource intensive uses (such as gaming) might take place on the same machine, and a lot of RAM used can also mean a lot more swaping, when well...

Now on the 1 GB (it's a uni-core), and yeah I'd prefer 2 GB though money is tight; if one had a duel or quad core; it should also be noted that many newer machines would also add the issue of RAM available per core, given they could load 2 or 4 WUs onto it. Obviously each core would be processing stuff, which would be taking memory to itself, aka the commit charge for the given task x the number of times it's running (on each core).

As long as other resources are being taken up in greater measure then on other projects, I do think it's fair to have somewhat higher credit returns (as had been previously/perhaps still is), given the utilization demand it puts on the machine, and then the amount of available RAM left to one's programs. The flip side, is that if all was absolutely equal (really not possible), if one was really after credits (vs "doing for the science"), they'd probably then favor the project which puts a smaller burden on their RAM pool. This might especially hold if a person is actively using the comp to do something which needs real time performance at times, and they start noticing a lot of swaping/hard drive thrashing during such times of their own activity, as things are beginning to feel "a bit laggy".

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Cosmology was showing a much higher memory size allocation for it's thread (via inspection in Task Manager), then other projects. I'm talking over 100 MB.

You really haven't processed anything here for a while if you think 100 MB is a lot of memory consumption. The current process in Task Manager shows the following:

Mem Usage - 325,784 K
VM Size - 325,776 K

That amount could double or triple over the runtime of the task, so just this one task could take up to 900 MB... The process may be on low priority, and the process will yield to CPU requests, but it doesn't give the RAM back, so this is more than just "idle cycles" being consumed... They really need to get the memory consumption under control.

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I don't know about the rest of you, but since:

1) I can't spend credits
2) I can't eat credits
3) I can't barter credits

... the only thing I find credits useful for is comparing different computers/users/processors within the same project. They're useful for deciding which computer is faster. They're useful for deciding how much faster a GPU is than a CPU. They're useful for showing who is contributing a lot to a project.

But they're utterly useless for comparing project A to project B.

I don't decide which projects to participate in based on credits. This isn't a video game, despite having been able to use game consoles as massive number crunchers. It's an opportunity for me to do some good in this world by maybe, just maybe, helping someone solve an important science problem.

Should I participate in a project that might help cure cancer at 20c/hr or one the does nothing useful at all at 100c/hr? For me, the answer is obviously the 20c/hr project, because of the basic reason I'm doing this.

Now, I do realize that the competitive aspect of accumulating credits and moving up on the leader boards is very alluring. I'm not immune to that. I know that this aspect entices LOTS of people to keep donating their resources to worthwhile projects. But I think we should all step back every now and then to remind ourselves why we're doing this in the first place. If you're here to help with the science, do you want the administrators spending their time improving the applications, or trying (continuously!!!) to defend their credit formula vs. the 100 other projects out there?

As for the question about "Where are the tangible rewards?" -- the answer is in the results produced by the cosmology project, and other projects. Whether it's increasing our understanding of the universe, helping to cure disease, proving a mathematical theorem, or finding ET (yeah, I know), the reward is in trying to make the world just a little bit of a better place.

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Want to find one of the largest known primes? Try PrimeGrid. Or help cure disease at WCG.

I am new at this donating and contributing game many of you are playing but I am thinking that I would like to see some returns for my contribution.

For example if I do a batch of work for a project they give me credits but credits are of no use. I am a Science guy and from my point I would like to gain knowledge from the contribution I did and not hope that I did some work that may have impact to the future. Come on who are you kidding? You have no Idea if your contribution was useful or not and was not some garbage that would not help anything in that matter.

Note: This stands for all projects not only cosmo.

If they use someone else's property to do their work they should give an insight to that person on what they just contributed to and what was the result they got.

This may sound violent but this is a world where people can take advantage of people without being noticed that they are taking advantage. In short every project should share information (Insight) of their projects. If its for good cause it can never be confidential as if its so use your damn own equipment.

Don't tell me anything less I may be new to this but I am also a researcher. Science flourishes in sharing. Don't keep the reward of insights on the site if you you do that, upload it to the PC or Server you just used as a thanks with the credits that you give and please Screensaver is considered hardly an insight.

Thank You

You are free to add your reviews and tell me if I am wrong on this even though I may feel I am right.

I agree with what you are saying here,
it would be nice to have an update once in a while as to project progress
the problem here is we dont hear from the cosmo staff much at all
and `simple things like the perpetual download errors dont get fixed
there i go again moaning about the download errors . . . .
a comment in the project announcmente thread would be nice
or some little thing on the home page.
O well, we are all just particles in the cosmos . . . .