what are credits for?

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Credits/Points are just a method of measuring your contribution to the project. And for the competitive amongst us to compare their contribution to others. Some don't care about the score, they crunch just for the science. Others crunch for projects that they believe in the science, but find the competition makes crunching more fun. And we can use credits to see if there's something wrong with a system - i.e. if a system should be able to produce 250 credits/day and it's producing 100/day after crunching fulltime 24/7, we know there's something that isn't right about that system.

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thank you very much!! i've been curious for awhile! have a great day!

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Credits/Points are just a method of measuring your contribution to the project. And for the competitive amongst us to compare their contribution to others. ...

and for multi-project crunchers to know roughly how their contributions are split among the projects. For this purpose (as well as for braggin) there are several unofficial (ie not BOINC and not Rosetta) services that provide stats boxes, like the one under my signature, fom which you can see that since I started BOINC I have given about half my machine power to Climate Prediction, about 1/5th here, and so on.

River~~

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You could assume that the credits belong to you, that you are accumulating them as you crunch along. However, rather than a pile of matchsticks sitting in front of you as you dice with that boinc game of poker, is that pile of matchsticks not actually sitting there in front of the boinc dealer? Maybe not as matchsticks that you have lost to him, but certainly as matchsticks you have given to him.

We always think that if we have money in our bank accounts we are in credit. In fact from the bank’s point of view we are in debit. The banks see everything that we owe to them as a credit.

I’m not trying to quibble about what is a credit or a debit depending on who you are or where you are looking from. It’s defining the value of the BOINC credit that is relevant. Is this value meaningless? Nothing? A few matchsticks? Or is it a representation of the value that Rosetta@home has of “you” as a contributor to their project?

And if anyone says that your credits mean nothing, well, just how much is that doggie in the window?

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A message from my penguin

AsteriX: No, whilst there's no huge piles of matchsticks anywhere, the credit DOES belong to the individual who has contributed computer power (that's your "pay" for doing the work). Not that you can do much with it...

Howeever, having I for example, have contributed 352000 (and some change) "cobllestones" to the Rosetta project (and twice that to all projects together).

Cobblestones is the official name for the unit of credit, by the way.

But they are pretty useless cobblestones, because I can't use them to pave my front yard, or to put in a ditch to make a dam or something... They are just numbers in a computer, really - and it's only useful to measure the amount of work produced by someones computer.

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Mats

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