I keep talking about K.I.S.S. and why I think BOINC is headed in the wrong direction. Here's one more reason. I was reading through the server_stable release notes this morning and came across this little note about a fix that I don't recall ever being discussed on the boinc_dev mailing list:

David 9 Jan 2012
- scheduler: the p_fpops value reported by clients can't be trusted.
Some credit cheats (e.g. with credit_by_runtime) can be done
by reporting a huge value.
Fix this by capping the value at 1.1 times the 95th percentile
of host.p_fpops, taken over active hosts.
No wonder the credit is so crappy on many projects. Anyone with a machine that doesn't fit the norm is assumed to be a cheater. What's the point of overclocking by 25% or more if you are going to be limited to 1.1 times the credit of that of the 95th percentile. Assuming that less than 5% of people crunching overclock their machines (e.g. the masses of set and forget certainly aren't overclocking!), then the 95th percentile is a stock machine. The assumption is that the same machine running on all operating systems returns the same GFLOPS calculation which it doesn't. Then again, isn't this a catch-22? If a machine is overclocked, it doesn't count towards the top 5% because it is assumed to be cheating and the number is capped at 1.1 x stock when it should instead be raising the bar and causing the value for the 95th percentile to be increased.

Note that it doesn't say the 95th percentile of MATCHING hosts either. So, if you have a new top of the line computer, you also get screwed because the majority of people will have much slower computers and your credit then gets capped because of their average.

Or, am I looking at this one all wrong?