Berkeley's idea at the moment, to my understanding of it, is that when
a computer downloads a work unit, it is downloaded by a specific
computer that Berkeley can tell what it is. With a proxy type program
that won't work. They have people cheating on Seti now! They download
one unit mostly finish it, move it to another computer, finish it and
then do the same thing with the unfinished part to dozens or whatever
of computers. Thereby getting credit on dozens of workunits when in
fact it is only one workunit returned dozens of times. That is my
understanding of part of the problem and their solution. The actual
method may be more complicated than the brief description I gave.
There are hundreds of thousands of work units returned daily, maybe
more. There is NO WAY for any type of computer system to timely
monitor for cheating when they give out the same unit themselves to
several people at once.
I mean there are public and private queues. Just removing the public
ones could solve part of the problem but not the one where I download
a batch of units and share it among the Team I am on.

On Sat, 18 Oct 2003 21:09:58 GMT, ciccio@formaggio.it (Alessandro
Freda) wrote:

I agree that insert an import/export function of data cached at client
level is not the right solution.
I think that the best solution is to develop a program like SetiGate
(BOINCGate?) that perform an other WU cache at proxy level. See my
post to SetiGate author on this NG.
May be possible insert the same caching policies of the client, also
for this second level cache, but it is not necessary. This L2 cache
tipically (like I do now with SetiGate) it's manually handled, because
I know the crunch speed of the off-line lan.

About the usefulness of a BOINC-Gate program: may be true that only
the 0,1% of the users use to import/export data through an off-line
lan, however this users often use many CPUs. For example at now I've
donated 73 years of CPU Time. 
Nevertheless I'm agnostic :) on this, so I suggest to start a poll on
the Seti@home home page to measure the "off-line" contribute.

Regards,
Alessandro

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On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 20:45:48 -0700, Karl Chen
<q204983@SPAM-REMOVE-quarl.org> wrote:

Through the web interface you can modify the policy for each
"venue" (home, office, school) (or all at once) various caching
and crunching/network policies: cache between X and Y days of
work; only crunch/download if you've been idle for X minutes, only
between hours X and Y, etc.

External media transfer agents (like the import/export feature in
SETI Gate for SETI@home classic) will not be easily implemented in
BOINC because the BOINC scheduling server needs to know how fast
each computer is, what work units it already has, etc.

Ciao,
-Ale

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