Avoid 6.6.20 like the plague ... 6.6.29 has some additional fixes in though it is not addressing your issue. I have never seen this ... are you running the screen saver? Or do you look at the graphics?

Well, good news is that Charlie Fenton is working in this area still ... we should see a couple minor improvements in 6.6.30 though I don't know if they will for sure affect the problems or not ...

Only time will tell. WHich version of BOINC?

In the end, the amount of credits you receive is the sum of all these variables. If your machine is always getting less than the 'credit claimed', it's because of the Boinc benchmark not taking the type of work Rosetta is doing into account for your system.

...it will get the same number of credits regardless of how long it takes. With all other things being equal, a 2ghz machine will take twice as long (and get 1/2 the credits/hour) as a 4ghz machine (same cpu, just changing frequency)

However, there must be something else going wrong here because most results I sent receive much less credit than the client claims and there is no other computer that did the same WU, so there is also no consensus like in other projects (3 results required, the middle claimed credit granted to all 3).

The consensus is from the other computers that did the same Work Units - although they start from different points, all tasks within a particular WU will take a similar amount of time and resources (there are exceptions, but it's a pretty good system). The other computers that crunched the same WUs as you must have claimed less credit than your machine - hence your granted credit being reduced.

I don't know of a way to filter the results to show all the jobs within a WU so you can compare your scores - i did it by downloading all the info into Excel and filtering that way, but that was a while ago now.

The xenon (and CellBE) use a form/subset of altivec so maybe/hopefully the dev team will work on improving this.

HTH
Danny

Yes, I run HT. So, I guess what we've proved here is that Pentium D is faster then P4 HT. Yes, I leave tasks in memory. Yes, I crunch 24/7 and only crunch Rosetta and Ralph.

So, seems my benchmarks accurately reflect the work produced and the credit I receive.

Martin, rereading your original post, you stated that Mac receive half the credit for the "same amount of work done". Do you understand how Rosetta defines "work done"? Or did you mean to say for the same amount of runtime? Since all credit is issued based on work done, it would not be possible for anyone to receive half of what anyone else gets for the same work done.

Issues like preempting, and running multiple projects do not really effect your credit for a given task. They pertain more to how much of a 24hr day gets reported back as meaningful results, which impacts your RAC.

My machine benchmarks similar floating point ops per second to yours, with the same size L2 cache, yet you received more credit per second then I did. You have a Mac, I have an Intel. Different operating systems, etc. What I'm trying to get back to, was your original question. You seem to feel that Macs are singled out and treated unfairly. But I don't see it.

I didn't mean to imply that 1000s of users are wrong, nor that you are wrong, nor that I am correct. I'm just trying to explain what I know, learn what you think and see if there is an explaination for your observation.

If you could point me to a hostID or two that would support your assertion, I'd be more inclined to accept your conclusion. And in the big scheme of things, it averages out, but if possible it would be most pertenant if you could show me another host that crunched that same task that you and I did. That was what I was doing for you, to bring you truely comparable numbers.

I think you are confusing RAC, with credit. If I did not leave applications in memory, and preempted to work on some other project (only other project I crunch is Ralph :) and was losing work, then my RAC would decline. However, my number of CPU seconds to complete the work I did would be nearly identical to, well indentical to the same machine configured in any other way.

If I've got 100min. in to a task, and then preempt it and force it out of memory, then upon restart I will see the CPU seconds drop back to the last checkpoint. Let's say back to 90min for example. So my total CPU recorded, and credits claimed would only be based on the 90min of work that survived. I will grant you that there are about 100 seconds expended in reinitializing a task after a full stop, and so I might report 100 seconds more then otherwise. But that's a 1% scale change. And so clearly not what we're talking about.

Are you confusing time on my wristwatch with CPU time? BOINC is reporting everything in actual CPU time. If my machine is configured to use 80% of CPU for example, you would never be able to see that in my credits for any specific work unit. This is because you would not know how many hours or days of time it took me to muster the 24hrs of CPU time reported. However, you WOULD see my RAC come down. But your question was not about RAC.

Yes, my settings are to crunch for 24hrs. That's my preference. And so we have to scale your information in to my runtime to account for that.

I think you probably have some other misconceptions about how credit works and I'd be glad to try and clarify things for you. Perhaps if you could explain how you concluded that my machine SHOULD have been able to do as many models in 30,000 seconds then I would better understand where you are coming from.

I had a very detailed review all prepared and got some error about the link timing out, and lost it all. But let me just throw this out there. I found a task that you crunched on your Mac, and I crunched on a Windows Intel. Please compare your task here, with mine here and let me know what you think about credit granted, claimed, fair, unfair whatever. By my calculations you received 50% more credit per second then I did, yet your benchmarks do not reflect that your machine does floating point that much faster then mine, and most of what Rosetta does is floating point.

[edit] and I would add that your machine appears to be able to crunch the 30 nstructs that mine did in about 52% of the time it took me to do it. So let's say your Mac is the benchmark system, all others are compared to it. You were granted 37 credits for your work. How many credits should I be granted based on your benchmark?

I think you should be fine with either BOINC version.

Rosetta implemented a new credit system in that timeframe. And what has come up is that on a Mac, the benchmarks run very quickly, and so they presume the machine will crunch well, and yet Rosetta doesn't run as fast as predicted by the benchmark. The new credit system grants credit for the number of models you've crunched. And since the Rosetta models don't compute on par with the BOINC benchmarks, you see a disparity between your claimed credit and your granted credit.

Just this week they added a mention on the site that says:

Note: the Mac OS X (PPC) application is not optimized and will not fully utilize the PPC processor.

"PPC" means Power PC.

Is it not possible for a MAC to run multiple tasks in parallel to fully utilize the bench mark speed.

Same problem here with result http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/result.php?resultid=55257558 (Mac-client).