Seti@Home credit seems low

Fardringle

Diamond Member
Oct 23, 2000
9,184
753
126
I haven't run SETI in the BOINC environment for a long time but decided that I'd like to do it again for a while to get the next stats milestone.

Is it just me, or is the credit for Seti@home really low compared to other GPU projects? Or am I doing something wrong?

Running Seti for a few weeks on my two home PCs with a GTX 1060 and a GTX 750Ti my absolute best day was just over 24K points, and most days were closer to 10K.

Those same two computers running Collatz and Moo together (Moo wasn't giving me a lot of work so I added Collatz into the mix) have been getting over 1.5 million per day combined a few times, with most days (when I actually use the computers so the GPU is idle for part of the day) around 800K to 1 million combined.

Do Collatz and Moo really give 100+ TIMES as many credits as Seti?
 

lane42

Diamond Member
Sep 3, 2000
5,721
624
126
I don't run windows anymore for D.C,. but I think that's the wrong app for the gpu.
And ouch for the times. 1.5 hours on a 1060. My cpu is almost 2 times faster. I
think if you run the special app and Linux your times would be more like 5-6 minutes.
 
Last edited:

Fardringle

Diamond Member
Oct 23, 2000
9,184
753
126
Linux isn't an option. I'm not opposed to Linux in situations where it can work. But for my home PCs, it can't do 90% of what I need my computers to do.

And I'm not really focused on having to run Seti. I was just curious if that was normal or if I have something set wrong.

Is there a 'special' app for Windows that I can try, or only for Linux?
 

Fardringle

Diamond Member
Oct 23, 2000
9,184
753
126
Thanks. The only Lunatics apps I was finding in Google searches were from 2016 or older so I figured they wouldn't be useful. I don't know why that page never came up in a search. I'll give it a try and see what happens.
 

lane42

Diamond Member
Sep 3, 2000
5,721
624
126
Sorry Fardringle, see you are using the SOG app. (opencl_nvidia_SoG)
 

lane42

Diamond Member
Sep 3, 2000
5,721
624
126
Your times for the 1060 look fine, just have to wait for a · Valid SOG task.
 
Last edited:

Fardringle

Diamond Member
Oct 23, 2000
9,184
753
126
Your times for the 1060 look fine, just have to wait for a · Valid SOG task.
Everything in my current pending list was run on an Intel iGPU, not the 1060 or 750Ti. I've let the Intel run it for a day or two just to see how poorly it does since it's only HD4000...
 

ao_ika_red

Golden Member
Aug 11, 2016
1,679
715
136
I learned few years ago that seti offered fewer credit because they wanted to encourage people running other projects as well. And I feel they still grant the same amount of credit since I started running seti in 2017.
 

lane42

Diamond Member
Sep 3, 2000
5,721
624
126
Each project is at liberty to award credit as they feel fit, thus using credit to compare between projects is difficult, if not impossible.
SETI uses a credit system called "Credit New", which is supposed to award credit proportional to the number of "FLOPS" that a task has taken. Many other projects do not use CreditNew, but either use a fixed credit per task, or some variation on the credit per task duration.
Thanks Ken g6, couldn't remember the name of it.
 
Last edited:

Fardringle

Diamond Member
Oct 23, 2000
9,184
753
126
I definitely understand how different projects give credits differently. There's a project callled iThena that gives something like .0000032 points per work unit (that takes about 30 minutes to process). They are changing that, but there's definitely plenty of variety. I was just surprised to see such low results on SETI.

It does look like the Lunatiks clients will help a lot with the SETI disparity. I need to wait for my computers to finish cleaning out the Moo tasks skill in their queues, but the few SETI results they have returned since I installed Lunatiks seem to be finishing as much as 10-12 times faster than the tasks that were run on the official server client. So that should be a nice improvement.
 

Fardringle

Diamond Member
Oct 23, 2000
9,184
753
126
Well, with a limited number of results to work with so far (about 46 completed on the GTX 1060), I'm getting about 8.5 points per minute of processing time with the Lunatiks app. That's definitely better than the about .9 points per minute I was getting with the default app!

Still a lot lower than Moo and Collatz, but those two projects give a silly amount of points for GPU tasks so it's to be expected. :)