Don't want to be argumentative

Well, why not? We can argue and still be friends.

but as someone who's run pretty much all of the major GPU projects (a lot and for a long time), in the earlier days MW credits were (and are) slightly higher than Collatz which was arguably because they were using double precision (which is why NVidia doesn't do so well at MW). MW credits were and are well below those in Donate, DistrRTgen, POEM, Moo and the early days of PrimeGrid (until PG lowered theirs).

The exhorbitant credit rates I mentioned were prior to their providing a GPU app. They may well have changed their ways before bringing GPUs on stream, I'm not sure. I quit the project in disgust and have never taken a second look at them. Ok, I admit I hold a grudge perhaps longer than I ought to but I recall the blatant lies and deceit they used to justify what they were doing and I despise them for it.

Edit: I see credits in the same light as playing a game. Only the object is to collect as many credits as possible. Adds a flavor of competition and helps many science projects. The difference as opposed to other games is that you're helping to promote science. A neat idea if you ask me...

It's a good analogy except in a game of Monopoly, for example, there are no consequences outside the game. In crunching there are real life consequences outside the credit game and some of those are negative for people who don't deserve to be abused. For example, the pursuit of credits recently at Oproject@home led one volunteer (perhaps more, not sure) to cheat in a way that injected thousands of bogus results into the project's result database jeopardising the research and possibly making the entire batch of results worthless, depends if the admin can filter out the bogus results. I have many hundreds of hours worth of results in that database and I am not pleased that one credit whore twit has risked all that. Indeed one can argue that project admins/devs should take measures against such horrible actions but not every project has the time and manpower to do that. One of BOINC's reasons for existing is to assist small projects just like Oproject, not put them in harm's way.

Another negative consequence is that projects do what MW and others do and steal volunteers away by doling out high credits. There will always be competition between researchers for funding but I will not allow that to creep into the BOINC world if I can do anything about it. I want BOINC to be a safe haven for projects where they don't have to compete that way, where they are not at risk, where they can devote their limited resources to their research.

You see I am all in favour of people having fun and doing what they want as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else. To me it seems like credits have a lot of negative consequences and I just don't think the benefits derived from credits outweigh the bad aspects. I do not accept the hypothesis that tons of crunchers will stop crunching if credits are abolished and I intend to prove that hypothesis is wrong by conducting a poll to gauge the community's thoughts on the matter. Once that information is known we will proceed accordingly to stop the crap that is going on as a result of this totally broken institution called credits. I wish it would work, I genuinely do, but I think the evidence suggests it cannot work, not ever, too much entropy in the system. Again, if there were no bad consequences I would say let it be and let the credit whores have their fun but it's hurting people who don't deserve to be hurt.

We're feeding all of this, slowly, to the man himself... DA.... and so far it seems like he is ready to maybe, said maybe, make a move on this though there is much to negotiate and common ground still to be found. He does not like what's going on either but feels somewhat powerless to stop it, maybe even feels it's not his place to stop it, you know, he and Rom bust their butts just to provide the software, a monumental task in itself and I think they don't have time to regulate its use. Should it be regulated? More important, can it be regulated? Depends who is willing to take the matter in hand and take the power, hmmm?. Like a good game of Euchre take the power if you think you can.

Hi All,

We have no plans for an AMD app right now. As you may recall, we did have an OpenCL build ready some years ago, but the AMD drivers were never stable enough - and performance too low - for us to want to deploy it. Since then, we've worked further on the Nvidia application to improve its features and performance, and it would now be substantial effort to rejuvenate the AMD OpenCL code.

I don't understand this. What is "Nvidia application"? Do you mean CUDA? I though both nVidia and AMD both depreciated their CUDA and CAL, in favor of OpenCL. Furthermore, even if CUDA is not yet dead, it surely will be eventually. Time to stop optimizing a dead end, and make OpenCL work. Or there will be no cards that can crunch GPUGRID in the end.

Nope. AMD left CAL in favor for OpenCL, whereas nVidia does OpenCL because they have to. They prefer CUDA and put as much weight behind it as they can. Currently it's much better than OpenCL and it's got more potential regarding optimization for nVidias own hardware. These are substantial advantages over OpenCL, which itself obviously has the advantage of "running everywhere". But how good does it run compared to optimized software

I expect CUDA to keep healthy at least a few more years. And if GPU-Grid suffers from not having access to AMDs (or whatever else may pop up using OpenCL or even other stuff) the scientists will have more time, since they're not as busy any more doing actual science work. At that point they'd be dumb not to extend their app to other platforms.

Well, and one could always argue that more speed is always better and may help you to get along with sloppy coding and less optimization, speeding up the scientific progress along the way. However, this shouldn't be considered normal for something deployed at the scale of BOINC.

MrS

---

Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002