Janus over on the AP forum was kind enough to provide us with this summary of BOINC/Astropulse.
Hope it answers a few questions
what we’re doing at the moment
David and his team of developers are developing a framework for distributed computing. This means that in the future other scientists won’t have to start over building everything up from the very bottom - they can use BOINC.
Currently we are trying to find any bugs in the software and improve the credit system so that “the game” is fair so to speak. Everything has to be checked and doublechecked before it is made available to all those thousands of thousands of potential users. We sure don’t want to start with a crash =)
Also, we are waiting for the first port of SETI to BOINC to be finished (1-2 months from now). SETI will very possibly be the first project for BOINC (as Astropulse is delayed - or at least that is what I have heard…).
>and what we will be doing in the future
SETI will have a short phase where it is running on both the old client and the new BOINC version. After a while Astropulse will join, then SETI-II southern hemisphere project.
an explanation of how the credits are worked out
The creditsystem is very different from the old SETI system. It prevents cheaters from having any personal gain by cheating (no credit) - so finally the competition is completely fair!
In the old SETI credit was measured in uploaded WUs - but sometimes a WU takes longer than others… Now in BOINC credit is measured in seconds of processing on a reference computer. This means that even though different projects have different WU times, the credit can be compared.It works this way:
- A WU is given to 3 or more clients.
Let’s say that you are one of these. You recieve a WU, process it and upload it again.- On the homepage you will be able to see that your computer claims a certain amount of Cobblestones* (credit) for processing the WU.
- Now the 2 other clients return their results.
- The results are compared to check for cheaters/errors.
- If 2 or more (the majority) of the results are identical these will get credit (because they are considered valid). Wrong results do not get credit.
That is the way it should work. If something goes wrong in one of the clients, the WU is simply distributed to more users in order to validate the result.
If you have any questions, please ask =)
Cobblestone: 1 day of work on the reference machine.
http://setiboinc.ssl.berkeley.edu/ap/forum/thread.php?id=86
regards
Sir Ulli