(I am commenting on some postings in a now locked thread here. I hope the forum owners don't see this as a breach of etiquette. I am not commenting on the various assumptions what some users or teams are presumably doing.)

Regarding the Formula BOINC sprint schedule:
Bryan wrote:

Natalia Makarova wrote:

I see two canceled Sprints

02/04/2020 17:00 (UTC) - 05/04/2020 16:59 (UTC)
Canceled
04/06/2020 20:00 (UTC) - 07/06/2020 19:59 (UTC)
Canceled

Is this tactic of some teams the reason?
What should other teams do in the competition if there are no tasks in the project?
My opinion: the Sprint policy should be changed.

No it has nothing to do with tactics. The FB Sprints followed the same dates as the real Formula 1 racing season. When the F1 season was interrupted because of Covid-19 then they cancelled the Formula BOINC sprints. Later they implemented FB sprints on their own schedule.

I suspect the first cancellation, which happened right away at the announcement time of the sprint on April 1, was because Rosetta@home was voted into the sprint project. At this time Rosetta was in one of its occasional periods when it does not have work.

The second cancellation definitely had nothing to do with F1 cancellations. It was the sprint at Wanless Mersenne +2, during which the project owner suspended operation. Sébastien cancelled this sprint retroactively.


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Regarding suitability of projects for Formula BOINC sprints:
VietOZ wrote:

There are 5 Sprints left
possible projects are ODLK, ODLK1, Amicable, NFS, NF, and SRBase. Cosmo is up and down, T.Brada hosted on a Rpi. Seti and Enigma are dead. Yafu won't have enough work. And Gerasism is only Windows.

As far as I can tell, ODLK and ODLK1 are in the very same category as T.Brada, although we only have the precise specs of the T.Brada server. (2 GB RAM, no further comment needed.)

The Yoyo@home server probably still is in the same category, but its owner keeps the configuration very very tight.

YAFU always has work, but is somewhat slow in generating it. Perhaps too slow for a sprint, I am not sure.


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Regarding sprint participants' computer capacity:
xii5ku wrote:

As an example, here are the sums of credits of all teams in Yoyo@home sprints throughout the years:
March 2017: 20 Million
August 2018: 59 Million
October 2019: 38 Million
September 2020: 63 Million

Numbers like this are significantly influenced by whether or not Gridcoin is present at a project. These are the four Yoyo@home sprint totals without Gridcoin's part:
March 2017: 18 Million
August 2018: 49 Million
October 2019: 32 Million
September 2020: 58 Million

The change from March 2017 to August 2018 is partially because 2017 was the first year of Formula BOINC's sprint format, and its Yoyo@home sprint was even the very first sprint in it, hence fewer teams and users were active in it.

The slump from 2018 to 2019 is partially because some teams who took part in the 2018 Yoyo@home sprint no longer did so in the 2019 and 2020 sprints.

Otherwise, we are obviously seeing here how users who are active in Distributed Computing modernize their hardware.