I've just checked that host and I agree that it's behavior is quite strange (a lot of invalids with very short computation time). However, I checked some of the valid returned results, they were returned very fast, nevertheless they seem 'good'. For any workunit, sent to at least two different users, we check the results, the two output files are compared byte by byte and declared valid if identical (this should definitely avoid any kind of cheating).

The BOINC server has also some kind of mechanism that should stop sending workunits to hosts that produce errors or invalid results. I will continue to monitor that host.

Be also aware that we have some kind of a bug in the application (and we weren't able to find it), in some cases when a workunit is started, stopped before the first checkpoint and re-started again the output file will become garbled and the final computation will be eventually declared invalid. However, this is a very rare event.

Both hosts belong to one of the gridcoin pools, so it's impossible for me to just warn the owner. The hosts seem obviously completely un-managed (no one cares about them). The uploaded output files are somewhat 'garbled' and clearly invalid, so rejected by the server. It's a waste of computational power but if the number of such hosts remains low this should not be a big issue.

There is a large number of hosts that download a lot of workunits and return them (correctly computed) after weeks (too late for validation). This is also a waste of power, probably a side effect of having such a large number of hosts that are not managed.

Anyway, thank you for the information, it's a 'behavior' that should be monitored.

The computational speed is strange indeed. It could be because of many reasons, the exe or the data files, the input and the big one (in this case hgnc_data_mat.csv) that have been modified. As far as I know BOINC should prevent tampering with those files but I'm not sure about this (there are some strange config options like that I do not fully understand). Why someone would like to intentionally do this (just waste computational power for zero credits)?. The output file is a big document and there is no way to guess it without doing the computation.

If a user would like to find a way to speed up the calculation (like Daniel did in the past) he can just play with the source code and then use the anonymous platform, but, first, he have to be sure that the calculation is correct, otherwise there is a very very low probability of getting a match at the validation stage and get some credits.