I made a longer more detailed discussion, but I think the main point I would 
make is that if there is a significant problem here it is that BOINC 
essentially "fails silently" when there are issues with a computer and a 
project.  I think that this is the larger issue here ... how does the 
participant find out he is trashing tasks ...

With the stress on run in "forget about it" mode, where is the notification 
mechanism ... I know I catch probably only half the cases where I have failing 
tasks for a long list of reasons...

If there is any interest in the REAL problem I can post that longer 
discussion...

But, right now most users that are trashing tasks has no clue that they are 
doing so ...


On May 24, 2010, at 12:03 PM, David Anderson wrote:

> The BOINC scheduler has a mechanism called "host punishment"
> designed to deal with hosts that request an infinite sequence of jobs,
> and either error out on them or never return them.
> 
> It works like this: there's a project parameter called "daily result quota",
> say 100.  Every host starts off with this quota.
> If it returns an error or times out, the quota is decremented down to,
> but not below, 1.  If it returns a valid result, the quota is doubled.
> The idea is that faulty hosts are given 1 job per day
> to see if they've been fixed.
> 
> Recently this mechanism was changed from per-project to per-app-version,
> the idea being that a host might be erroring out on a GPU version
> but not the CPU version.
> 
> However, the basic mechanism is somewhat flawed:
> 
> 1) What if a fast host can do more than 100 jobs a day?
> We could increase the default quota, but that would let bad hosts
> trash that many more jobs.
> 
> 2) It takes too long for a fixed host to ramp up its quota.
> 
> The bottom line: as long as a host is sending correct results,
> it shouldn't have a daily quota at all.
> 
> ---------
> 
> If anyone has ideas for how to change the host punishment mechanism,
> please let me know.
> I'll think about it and post a proposal at some point.
> 
> -- David
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