The Scottish Boinc Team

There appears to be a huge difference in the amount of credit given per CPU time between projects. Why? I would have thought they would give credit equally for all projects in order for people to choose projects without consideration of credit given.

scole250 wrote:There appears to be a huge difference in the amount of credit given per CPU time between projects. Why? I would have thought they would give credit equally for all projects in order for people to choose projects without consideration of credit given.

Your assumption is not unreasonable - equal credit for equal work was/is pretty much the basis for Boinc. The problem is that the credit is set by the admins for each project. You would have thought that this might lead to rampant credit inflation. Strangely it hasn't possibly because obvious abuses have been stamped on and some of the older projects (eg SETI & WCG) have their loyalists so get off with being a bit mean. But there is substantial inequality.

But, hey! It's not all about credit.

Why do projects like PrimeGrid and Collatz provide credits so much higher than others? SETI, Einstein, Cosmology and Milkyway return about 1/4 of credit PrimeGrid does, on my computers anyway. I recently added PrimeGrid and was shock at much more credit was earned. I'm not knocking anyone processing for credits. Just wondering why it appears some projects produce more credits. Are you saying the physics projects admins are just stingy or something else?

The main difference is due to a credit system imposed on Boinc by the main guy behind Seti. The credit system is a complete basket case in my opinion as it is not even consistent. Never the less in an attempt to impose his vision of Boinc on all, the credit system is embedded in the server software. Many projects follow this system. Others modify it to there own ends hence why you see such better credits given by prime, gpugrid, collatz, distrtgen etc. Other projects modify it because they existed outside of Boinc first ie skynet etc.
The difference is far wider than you think. Take for example one of my computers. An i7 with an HD 7970 and a R9 280 GPU. These 2 GPU's generate over a million points on Collatz, 20K on Seti. I personally, will not spend the best part of £500 on GPU's in this one system for 20k/day. For my investment I expect better than cpu credit. I run seti when the team needs it, guess where the cards spend most of there time.
Try skynet POGS for decent cpu credit and a worthwhile project.

Have a read through this thread http://www.setiusa.us/showthread.php?24 ... -generator with emails from David Anderson explaining credit random. ... and admins trying to get the point over that on every project that has implemented it, the crunchers hate it.

I think what I was seeing was the difference between the credit earned when GPU crunching vs. CPU. I've never looked at anything compared GPU vs. CPU processing power. Are GPUs that much faster than CPUs or are they just better at some tasks?

Massively faster and massively better at tasks that can run on them. There are still tasks that only the cpu can do though.
Take an comparison of Gflops as how much work can be done. My I7 3770K is capable of 100 - 115 Gflops depending on clockspeed. My HD7970 GPU is capable of 9728 Gflops.
A Ghz edition ATI 7770 costs about £70 on ebay and does 3200 Gflops. A £50 ATI 7750 will do 2176Gflops.