With the original seti program I could reasonably figure out what the stats were counting. Can someone explain what the "Total Credit" and "Recent Average Credit" mean, please. Is this total work units, hours, seconds, what is being "credited"?

Apologies if this has been asked, I've tried searching the archive but wasn't hitting on the corect word combination, evidently.

With the original seti program I could reasonably figure out what the stats were counting. Can someone explain what the "Total Credit" and "Recent Average Credit" mean, please. Is this total work units, hours, seconds, what is being "credited"?

Apologies if this has been asked, I've tried searching the archive but wasn't hitting on the corect word combination, evidently.

Actually, none of the above. It is crediting work done. Since each WU is different (sometimes by orders of magnititude) counting WUs is not fair. Counting wall or CPU seconds is not fair either as slow machines would get the same credit as fast machines. The way that the system is supposed to work is that for any given WU, all of the computers that crunch that WU are supposed to request the same amount of credit based on time spent and processor speed. Since there are, in actual fact, variations in the credit requested, the high and low requests are discarded, and the mean of the remaining results is taken as the credit granted to all.

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BOINC WIKI

Hello, and welcome to BOINC! :)
No need to apologize for asking. We've all been new sometime.

I'll try to explain the main differences, but the best explanation is in Paul D. Buck's (unofficial) documentation: original here or new Wiki here.

Both Classic SETI and BOINC has Work Units (WU's), but while

Classic SETI is granting WU's,
BOINC is granting Credits.

Credits are partly based on Cobblestones, which is GFLOPS * 100.
So, if your puter is 2 GFLOPS, Cobblestones would be about 200.
The speed of your puter is benchmarked by the BOINC Manager, and the result is basis for claimed Credits (and the "To completion" column in BOincMgr).

The formula for calculating credits are complex, so I refer to the docs as I can't remember it out of my head. :) The benchmark, mentioned above, calculates Dhrystones (integer speed) and Whetstones (floating point speed) of your puter. These figures are then used in the formula for claimed Credits.

Claimed Credits is not the same as Granted Credits, because it depends on other people's claims too. Three or four other people are chrunching the same WU as you, and the finally Granted credit for you will be the same as for all the others in your WU "group".

See the docs for more info.
I hope this helped somewhat. :)

Actually, none of the above. It is crediting work done. Since each WU is different (sometimes by orders of magnititude) counting WUs is not fair. Counting wall or CPU seconds is not fair either as slow machines would get the same credit as fast machines. The way that the system is supposed to work is that for any given WU, all of the computers that crunch that WU are supposed to request the same amount of credit based on time spent and processor speed. Since there are, in actual fact, variations in the credit requested, the high and low requests are discarded, and the mean of the remaining results is taken as the credit granted to all.

Ahh, thank you for the quick answer. Let me make sure I understand what you're saying:

The "credit" is an average of time *and* proceesor speed over a set number of machines (say 10 machines are running the same work unit, high and low are tossed, everyone is given the average that is derived.) Got it.

Hello, and welcome to BOINC! :)
No need to apologize for asking. We've all been new sometime.

Thank you for the welcome.

Claimed Credits is not the same as Granted Credits, because it depends on other people's claims too. Three or four other people are chrunching the same WU as you, and the finally Granted credit for you will be the same as for all the others in your WU "group".

See the docs for more info.
I hope this helped somewhat. :)

It does help. I've noticed that there are times my "requested credit" has been spot on with the "granted credit" and other times it's over or under by quite a lot, is there anything to derive from this or just the nature of the beast?

If you look at the WU's you have participated in, you'll see how many are crunching the same WU's as you and that highs and lows are discarded.

Click on the WU number to the left to see details for that WU. The result link on the far left is details for your result.

In this WU, you had the canonical result, which means that your claimed result was granted to all in that group.

Our posts crossed just now. :)

I've noticed that there are times my "requested credit" has been spot on with the "granted credit" and other times it's over or under by quite a lot, is there anything to derive from this or just the nature of the beast?

Yes, you're right that sometimes your claims are over and sometimes they're under what's granted at the end. It all depends on how fast or slow the other puters in your WU group are.

But the goal, as JM7 said, is that the mean of the group - after high and low values are discarded - is granted to all. Sometimes this mean figure is a calculated average (I've seen this only a few times myself), but most times a concrete result is taken as the (average) canonical result.

If you look in the FAQ section (big blue ? symbol on the main page, click on it) will allow you to look at the largest FAQ group of the whole BOINC thingie.

Clicking on the links takes you to a glossary in either my old site or the Wiki. In either case, the linking is, um, obsessive to allow you to find out what we mean in BOINC when we use ANY term. The Old glossary is the most complete, and will be for another couple days, but the Wiki Glossary is also getting definitions that are new ...

We have definitions for well over 200 terms, A good FAQ on CPDN, and a partial conversion of the Owner's manual ... sorry, you caught me with my site in transition. One other benefit to the new Wiki is that I have almost all of the "official" UCB documentation now converted over to the Wiki ...

The only place the Wiki lags is in images ... sorry ...

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