The messages only turned up after this topic started. Other than that we were waiting for the best part of 12 hours for info.

I've been trying to keep the news updated (somewhat more briefly than what's in here) whenever something new happens. Other more minor details i'm keeping here in the forums :)

HM, that is quite little per WU, if it earlier was around 2-4 CS per WU.

It could have at least been 2CS per WU.

Which would make a ratio of 1CS per every 196 SEC of crunching time...
now it's 1CS per 392 Sec which is ever worse than the official SETI,
who have the lowest CS ratio that I know of out of all projects !

Even if Cosmology@home have a fixed credit, they have 100CS per WU,
they of course have a lot longer WUs, but the ratio CS/Crunching time
is still around 140-150 sec per CS.

I think this project will loose a lot of participants this way...

... but that is really your problem I suppose !

At least I'll put Milkyway@home on hold for now, I'm not crunching for peanuts !

I suggest you screen just the Top-20 users for manipulated credits and manually reset them to 1. All the rest would probably be much too much work and will most probably upset all users.

Now hang on...

I was the participant leader here for a bit, and am still in the top 20. I have never done anything but used standard BOINC clients, and fiddling with benchmarks. Check with my BOINCstats history. I have done no wrong. And resetting my 33k hard earned credits (especially with all the pop-ups!) is unfair. However, perhaps you mean to reset each result to 1, rather than set the total credits to 1? That I can agree with if it is applied to everyone, not just the top 20 or whatever.

since we've gone to a new credit granting scheme and have some problems with the previous one, i'm thinking about starting all the credit over from scratch (if i can even figure out how to do this). I've been looking for a way to remove credit for individual workunits but so far haven't been too successful. if anyone has some knowledge about this let me know :)

Why are there different sizes of work-units for Windows and Mac? On my windows machine (http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/results.php?hostid=2423) I receive work units that grant appr. 1.15 credits while on my Macs (http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/results.php?hostid=2420) there are only much smaller work units that grant only 0.63 credits.

currently the workunits are all of the same size. the problem might be that your mac is crunching the numbers a lot faster (esp if it's a 64 bit one) so you're not getting as much credit. right now i'm working on updating the validator to have fixed credit per work done, so this should be fixed soon.

Most of the reliable results that I have seen are granted credit of 1.50-1.80 per WU. I would suggest to make it somewhere in this range or just make the value 2 to be nice and simple.

I don’t know what the variables involved may be—I could be comparing apples to oranges—but that seems very high. My G5’s recent tasks have each taken just under 3.5 minutes and earned 0.63 or 0.64 of a cobblestone, for an average production of about 11 CS/h, quite typical for this system on other projects. (I’ve also had a small number that take double the time, earning double the credit.) At 2 CS/WU this host would be getting about 35 CS/h, much more than it does on SETI@home using a third-party optimized application, let alone on any other project with a stock app.

If the WUs vary that much—by a factor of two, three, or more—a fixed-credit system won’t be suitable unless the variations are predictable and can be quickly assessed by the servers, e.g. from the number of stars or time-steps in a simulation.