Auto-balance credits for multiple projects?

Message boards : BOINC Manager : Auto-balance credits for multiple projects?
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Matt

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Joined: 20 May 07
Posts: 1
Message 10397 - Posted: 20 May 2007, 23:47:50 UTC

I'm fairly sure this isn't a feature of BOINC right now, but I just wanted to make sure (and make the suggestion that it should be added :-) ):

If I'm signed up for multiple projects, is it possible to have BOINC try to keep the number of credits about equal for each one? I have a lot of projects I participate in, and I like the idea of contributing equally to each of them, but it gets old constantly telling all but one project to not fetch new work, and to always have to monitor BOINC to see when that project no longer has the least amount of credits. If this is a feature then awesome, but if it's not, where should I go to make this suggestion?
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Odysseus

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Joined: 5 May 06
Posts: 50
Canada
Message 10398 - Posted: 21 May 2007, 1:17:26 UTC - in response to Message 10397.  

If I'm signed up for multiple projects, is it possible to have BOINC try to keep the number of credits about equal for each one? I have a lot of projects I participate in, and I like the idea of contributing equally to each of them, but it gets old constantly telling all but one project to not fetch new work, and to always have to monitor BOINC to see when that project no longer has the least amount of credits. If this is a feature then awesome, but if it's not, where should I go to make this suggestion?

There’s no such automatic feature AFAIK; BOINC has no way of knowing in advance how much credit will be earned from results it hasn’t even downloaded yet. But a much easier approach than micromanaging which projects are allowed to get work from day to day is to assess the statistics, adjusting the projects’ resource shares according to their rates of production.

For example, suppose that when allowed to run ‘freely’ for a couple of weeks, with resource shares of 100 all round, project A gets an RAC of 50, project B gets 100, and C gets 125. Setting A’s resource share to 200 and C’s to 80 should bring their earnings much closer together (at around 80); if they still seem imbalanced after another couple of weeks, adjust accordingly. Of course some projects have WUs that vary in productivity of credit, so if you get a run of ‘poor’ or ‘rich’ tasks you might need to under- or overshoot the target. But over the long term you should be able to come up with a reasonably satisfactory formula that doesn’t require constant intervention.

With equal resource shares you will be “contributing equally” in a sense—in terms of CPU-time if not credit—but regardless, whatever metric you prefer can be implemented through the resource-share settings.

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Message boards : BOINC Manager : Auto-balance credits for multiple projects?

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