I'm having trouble deciding on whether to run some projects through BOINC or not. There seems to be no way to know if projects are already overloaded with users (ie., too many users for a limited amount of data to process). In other words, I don't want to waste my computer's time running tasks that have already been run and re-run by others. My question is: Is there some "metric" available for each project that shows the ratio of users to available data ? (maybe there is and I just don't know where to look.) Thanks in advance for an answer to this.

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The best source for monitoring available work is looking at the projects server status page. That usually tells you how many work units are ready to send, how many are waiting for validation, etc... etc...

Even a quick browse through their forums for multiple complaints for lack of work is a pretty good indicator too.

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In other words, I don't want to waste my computer's time running tasks that have already been run and re-run by others.

Don't know of any BOINC project that does that.

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The closest thing might be to simply look at how many replications of each WU are sent out; some projects need a degree of redundancy to verify their tasks, while others only need one replication. For some projects (especially wrappers) this might be difficult to obtain, because the WU distribution is not very linear. Of course, at some point there are probably going to be some "repair" WUs sent out when the originals aren't sent back in time/aborted/error or when a block of work is nearing completion and/or needs an extra boost.

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My Detailed BOINC Stats