Sounds like the old days of Seti when guy's had computers like this.
and downloaded thousands of workunits.
The reporting deadline at SETI@home was measured in months though; at SiDock its just 6 days. :
-)
Seems that it would be hard to benefit from though unless you knew from whom or when you were holding points from.
They have these buffers for different reasons than this one, most certainly.
I saw a few of such hosts which are currently reporting results. These computers could either be ones on which the owners attempted to bunker for the 2 days between announcement and start of the contest, and then for some reason neglected to revert the 'bunker mode' settings after the start. Or, less likely, the owners wanted to have a work queue of more than 2/CPU for their normal crunching but went seriously overboard with their queue settings.
But the older ones of my pending results have wingmen hosts which have
not yet reported a single result since they started downloading. The owners of these hosts certainly want to bunker until nearer the end of the contest.
Why bunker until close to the end? In the Pentathlon, one would do this primarily because teams need to split their resources between several contests, and you want to keep your competitors guessing how many of your own resources you have put here or there. In Formula BOINC, you would want to keep particularly those competitors guessing who have a habit of hopping between teams. In any contest, you would want to keep your competitors guessing if you are afraid that they pull in some reserves (e.g. call for help from friends, or spend big money in the cloud).
There are some paranoid people who have another hypothesis about hosts which download a lot of tasks but don't return any results anytime soon: The paranoia suggests that these tasks were never meant to be processed, such that the wingmen don't get their results validated (before the deadline of the captive tasks passes, and replicas are sent by the project server and processed by third hosts). However, I for one don't subscribe to this paranoid hypothesis. Such a scheme can't be working as effective as the paranoia would make it seem, IMO.
They are just users who know enough to be dangerous. I think I am still nominally in that camp, though in the past couple of years I have learned to abort excess tasks, which, while not as good as not getting excess work in the first place, at least frees them up for immediate re-issue.
Somehow I don't have high hopes in the responsibility particularly of the owner(s) of hosts with 2048 tasks in progress. We'll see.
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