RE: Towards an Incentive-Compatible Magnitude Distribution
Funny you posted this considering what i just pusted minutes before you.
Either way your idea is flawed for a variety of reasons : Not all hardware behaves equal on the same project. For example, and you can find lots of forum treads about it, TN-Grid brutally devours ram bandwith, and, you get situations like, to the surprise of a contributor, his 24 core xeon is only crunching about a 20% more than his i5. On the other hand most math related projects make a very efficient use of a cpu capability due to their greater simplicity allowing them to stay on the cache.
What we need is magnitude tiers , which multiply the amount of grc distributed, for example something like this .
-1-3rd most crunched project : 3x magnitude
-Opensource application (which implies it avaliable for many platforms) - 1.25 x magnitude .
-Often runs out of tasks - 0.75 x Magnitude
But i dont know how hard something like that would be to implement, my gut says that it shouldnt be to hard, though.
I hesitated to take credit for the idea as I wasn't sure if I was the first person to suggest this. Also, I began writing this yesterday ;)
I think I addressed your concern in part (e). I agree it's very complicated, but I don't think it's beyond the community to arrive at a reasonable and equitable way of devising standardized benchmarks. I brought this up to stimulate conversation - maybe others already have some ideas.
I'm not sure that the magnitude tiers solution you mentioned adequately addresses problems 1 and 3, and I think it closely mirrors the thread @donkeykong9000 wrote yesterday that I mentioned in regards to problem 2. I guess problems 4 and 5 aren't incentive related problems, but I still think they're worth keeping in mind.