I'm fairly new to BOINC and crunching, but I've noticed that a lot of people and groups are highly competitive with their credits. This can be a good thing in that healthy competition can mean more publicity and crunching for worthy projects, but I've notice some people using modified clients to (cheat?) get more credits. I've even seen people and groups post about high credit projects that they can use to increase their credits quickly. This can be detrimental in that some project that give less credit, but are very worthy of crunching may get less publicity and crunching than less worthy high credit projects. I know that the worthiness of a project is a matter of opinion, but I don't think that worthiness should be determined based on how much credit a project gives.

What are some projects that give relatively low credit and/or get less crunching than they may deserve?

To see which projects give more (or less) credit than other projects take a look at the Project credit comparison table.

Thanks, but how do I read those charts? Can you give me a couple of examples of what the numbers mean?

The Project Credit Comparison chart is ratio based so if you're reading down the left hand side of the chart the first row is "APS" . This row compares the relative credit of APS versus each of the columns. So in the first cell you have APS vs APS so obviously there's no real comparison there. the next cell over in the first row is APS vs Boinc Alpha Test with a value of 1.3571. This basically means that for you'll be granted 1.3571 times more credit per CPU second running APS than you would get running Boinc Alpha Test.

Keep in mind that these results are not as straight forward as you might think for several reasons. First off, a CPU second isn't worth the same on every PC (think PII vs brand new quad core - which does more actual "work" in a second?). This definitely skews the results to favour projects that have high minimum processor/RAM requirements as these projects won't have any old PIIs or PIIIs attached. As well, projects will occassionally adjust their credit granting as well so these results are typically in flux. You can always click on any of the numbers in the chart and get a more detailed breakdown of how the comparison was made.

If you're interested in which projects are currently getting the most (or least in this case) activity credit wise you can always check here as well...

Thanks. I'm going to add BRaTS@Home based on the info from this thread and http://wizlair.mine.nu/chart/creditchart.htm
Edit: Never mind. They are not accepting new accounts. Back to the charts and descriptions.

You'll find most of the projects with really low credit in the last day either a) have no work, or b) have closed user creation so they have much fewer crunchers.

One project I think gets overlooked a bit is The Lattice Project - they run a bunch of different biology based applications through a single BOINC project. If you do take up crunching there you'll want to make sure your computers are attached to more than one project as they do have some times when they run out of work. You can always set your resource preferences to effectively crunch one as your main project and the other as a backup.

Greetings.

I think Poem@home is worthy of more participation.
Putting what little I have into that and climate prediction work.

Yes, there are a number of small projects still without large numbers of volunteers.

CPDN looks like a really enormous project on the stats pages, but although there are a lot of registered and crunching members, not all of them realise that they need to take precautions to actually complete the long climate models, or take the time to post about problems on the forums so that they're more successful in future.

So new members prepared to have a look at the CPDN README collections, particularly link #5 in the README about crashes, and also prepared to look at the README about backups to learn how to regularly back up the contents of the BOINC folder, are very welcome indeed.

http://www.climateprediction.net/board/index.php

CPDN credits are awarded very fairly for the amount of work done, but unless you have Linux you generally get fewer credits than on many other projects. So the most successful CPDN crunchers are people who consider the challenge of completing a long model for the science more important than accumulating credits.

But the comparison is done with the same host. It compares your PIII in APS against your same PIII in BOINC Alpha.

I guess you're right if you go by the 2nd chart...I've always been too lazy to scroll down that far, although I probably should have in this case. I never really look at these comparisons anyway - I just crunch what I feel like. Whenever I feel like comparing credits I always do it project by project and not as a whole, otherwise it's like comparing apples to oranges (or with BOINC credits I guess it's more like comparing whole baskets of various mixed fruits!).