Lynn W. Taylor wrote: > The benchmark affects the estimated run time, and the amount of work > downloaded. It affects credit, and credit is "fun" but it's not science.
However, the people that care about the credits consider them to be a lot more than just a bit of frivolous "fun". Have you seen the volumes of discussion about credits?!... Also, the various stats taken and presented for all manner of aspects for the credits awarded very well /could/ be a science *IF* those credits *DID* actually represent anything tangible or accurate. How many stats sites are there now for Boinc?... At the moment, I suspect that the error bars might mean a little for s...@h (and any similar FLOPs intensive project counted in the same way). However, for other projects, I expect the error bars would drive away most of the competitive crunchers. And as for the argument that not many people would leave should the credits be abandoned, it would be 'interesting' to see that tried and to see what proportion of the results the competitive crunchers do indeed provide, for free. Try a zero credits month as an experiment? > As you correctly said, it will measure something about the quality of > the network. And the credits *could* be used as a *useful scientific measure* of the success of Boinc, the efficiency of certain methods over other methods, the effectiveness of some hardware over other hardware, and who knows what else, *if* we had some *accuracy* to what is being added up. Calibration? Consistency? At the moment, all that the crude benchmark is useful for is to say that Boinc can be considered to be a "pseudo-supercomputer" of a potential "xxx Tera-whetstones". Good for grabbing headlines and I guess good for impressing ignorant bean-counters bureaucrats (and an unfortunate distracting necessity). > ... (and you apparently didn't read) is that the science > application produces a result, and that result is either valid (the... Can we all keep off the ad-hominem please and keep this "scientific"? Aside: How do you rate the Monte-Carlo type simulations?... Or indeed such as the CPDN simulations that can sometimes be sensitive to which hardware is running the simulation? How 'correct' is 'correct'?... Do we "reward" for the result returned, or for the resource that a project has usefully utilised? If the credits are such a bit of "fun" and "fluff", should we avoid all the wasted discussion and abandon them now?... Regards, Martin -- -------------------- Martin Lomas m_boincdev ml1 co uk.ddSPAM.dd -------------------- _______________________________________________ boinc_dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ssl.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/boinc_dev To unsubscribe, visit the above URL and (near bottom of page) enter your email address.
