First off, I would like to start off with how I came up to this situation and I do think it is possible to have been occurring for many of the people and I could not find any suggestion when I searched the net. So I was quite happily contributing in the asteroid at home even though it had many participant because even at full load my gpu temp (gtx 1050 ti) never went above 60 C and also that it used very nominal cpu time so that every threads could be fully utilized by the cpu project.
And there was a maintenance with the server of asteroid at home and no work unit to process. So, I tried changing the project to a few. First, I tried Amicable number, Einstein at home and also Collatz conjecture through the pool 1 GRC pool but I didn’t receive any gpu work units for a whole day. So, I changed to Prime grid where at least I got the work load and I was happy. But after a 1 hour of crunching I just found my mag to be like 0.2 which was like crazy high for a gtx 1050 ti. And I saw that most of the task I have had were giving computation error except for the shortest task of the PPSieve which took only 15 minutes to compute. I thought it was because the given numbers were not prime. So I just crunched for a few days just giving a 2-4 hour for prime grid and today I looked at the host page and I found that out of 124 work units assigned to me 99 showed error.
Here’s the links for my host computer for prime grid.
( http://www.primegrid.com//show_host_detail.php?hostid=908048)
And here’s the snapshot for the graph of my RAC for prime grid.
To say the least I was shocked that this was happening. The implication it made was tremendous. I was cheating the RAC even though it was unintentional. And I can be sure that many of other volunteers are also having the same condition. This also tells us that it is possible to cheat and get high RAC without getting much work done. Because BOINC cannot stop the user from aborting the larger work unit which give less credit. Which might affect the BOINC contribution.
All I want to do with this post is to raise awareness that this thing can happen and also the instance where it has happened. And I don’t know if it’s possible but can there be a check like if most of the work units are getting computation error then do something about it.
Also, if there is anything that can be done please reply.
