Posts by Ringold

1) Message boards : Current tests : New crediting system (Message 2090) Posted 16 Aug 2006 by Ringold Post: and some of the Intel P4s that are getting rather poor scores on the standard boinc benchmark when compared to AMD Athlon cpus. Linux I don't know about, but keep in mind mhz for mhz, a P4 will bite the dust every time in comparison to an A64. Its architecture is just fundamentally inferior. If boinc benchmarks are significantly different than the difference in other real, commonly accepted benchmarks (like those done at Anandtech, Bit-Tech, and HardOCP) then thats one thing. Otherwise, thats what one gets for buying a P4. Core 2 Duo, likewise, should womp Athlon 64 X2's. But considering an A64 3200+ isn't truly necessarily the equivalent of a P4 3.2ghz, as long as P4s generally trail roughly equivalent A64 chips then the benchmarks are actually right-on. I can see why some of you guys see going back and updating the scores as a bad idea, stealing credits, etc. As far as you guys knew, and apparently with the admins blessing, cheating credits-wise was legal. On the other hand, there's a ton of people who see the cheating going on, look at the rules and see no rule against it, and.. flame wars like this start up. At the very least moving forward, I'm glad the system is changing. Going backwards, got to say it doesn't matter much to me. To those that really, really want scores to be revised back to Feb, consider this. Cheaters RAC will drop to sane levels, right? Some will even become upset that they can no longer cheat and their RAC will slowly fade to 0. Given not too much time at all, they'll fall to a place in their ranks closer to where they deserve anyway. If it takes too much effort to revise the old scores on part of the folks running the program I hope it just gets left as it is. Time will sort out the rest at the very least.
2) Message boards : Current tests : New crediting system (Message 2034) Posted 13 Aug 2006 by Ringold Post: Thats good to hear; otherwise it'd be a silly arms race with scientists that should be more mature than that. Anyway, this whole issue is astounding. I think the new method seems to be the closest R@H can get to Folding@Home's method of granting credit, and F@H is as fair as you can get. What I see is a knee-jerk reaction to no longer being able to cheat (tralla; anyone using an 'optimized' client is attempting to get higher points than the masses and justifications of lame benchmarks is merely an excuse since everyone has lame benchmarks -- except the cheaters with optimized clients. Dictionary could tell anyone as much!) and get sky-high points. Everything else is not understanding the credit system. What else could be had against a system that promises fair credit distribution? Only fault with the plan seems to be thinking that the majority of the RALPH pool will be more 'pure' than the R@H pool of users.. if tralla is an example, maybe not the case? If F@H's system can be used directly here somehow I think it'd be the best possible solution instead of trusting the masses. As long as BOINC is open-source or can be reverse engineered, there will be corrupted clients, and as long as there are corrupted clients, there will be people complaining (and rightfully so). And regarding what seemed to be a misconception about the 'golden machine' rule in general.. Why would you need 60 machines to establish a baseline? Yes, a P4 3.0ghz will behave differently than a A64 X2 4800 or an Core 2 Duo 6700. The other two will probably get more work done in a unit of time even at the same clock speeds (depending on optimizations). Therefore, they'll pound out more WU or at least WU worth more points. Thats the point, being credited based on scientific output, not CPU time or even artificial measurements of theoretical FLOPS preferably. Some CPU's get more work done than others, obviously! That type of system can't be tampered with in terms of rewarding points for science. I don't visit the main F@H forums often, but I do the top leading teams (HardOCP & those aussies) and virtually never has there been dissent over credit claims. I frequent the [H] board daily, and actually cant recall it ever being an issue. There really can't be; its set server side based on the baseline, and that is that. If one wants to 'cheat' and get more points than one can overclock to the limits of stability, but beyond that, no real cheating. Anyway, looking forward to some RALPH WU. Looks like this will be an important project, and someone indicated RALPH gets light WU streams. Finishing up 2 CPDN models on an X2 but want to help R@H in the mean time since I hadn't in a while so this will be perfect.