Search Results for: credit
I have completed a result, but I have not yet received credit for it. What is going on?
BOINC does not award credit to users until the work they have performed has been successfully validated. This means that users may experience a delay in being granted credit while BOINC waits for enough results to be returned in order to perform validation.
How do I calculate my FLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second) based off my World Community Grid points?
BOINC provides a reference about credit and its relation to FLOPS here. However, you should know that seven (7) World Community Grid points are equal to one (1) BOINC credit.
Therefore, your total World Community Grid points divided by 700 gives you the number of GigaFLOPs and your World Community Grid points divided by 700,000 gives you the number of TeraFLOPs.
In Advanced View, on the BOINC Manager, under Statistics, what do the figures on the y-axis represent?
The figures represent BOINC credits. A BOINC credit is equal to 7 Points on our website. Additional information on the BOINC Manager - Advanced view may be found here.
How will statistics be updated for GPU participation?
World Community Grid will award run time based on the elapsed time from when a work unit is started and when it finishes running. Credit and result counts will be awarded in the same manner as CPU participation.
How are Team Points and Personal Points Distributed?
Points that you earn are only credited to a team if they are earned while you are a member of that team. Additionally, if you quit a team or join another team, then the points that you earned for your previous team will stay with that team. You cannot transfer credit you previously earned to a new team.
Any points you earn whether you are on a team or not will always show up under your personal statistics.
You can view the points that you have earned for different teams at the bottom of your My Contribution page.
May I invite more teams to my Team Challenge after I issue it?
Once a Team Challenge has been issued (by pressing the submit button on the Issue Team Challenge page), no more teams may be invited. If you have issued an Open Challenge, other teams may still join the challenge up to the Start Date, or until the end of the challenge if you have chosen to allow Late Joiners (Late Joiners only get credit for statistics accumulated after joining the challenge).
How are points calculated?
Points are calculated in a two-step process which attempts to give a consistent number of points for similar amounts of research computation. First, the computational power/speed of the computer is determined by periodically running a benchmark calculation. Then, based on the central processing unit (CPU) time spent computing the research result for a work unit, the benchmark result is used to convert the time spent on a work unit into points. This adjusts the point value so that a slow computer or a fast computer would produce about the same number of points for calculating the research result for the same work unit. This value is the number of point credits "claimed" by the client. More information about that formula is available here.
Second, research results returned to the servers are validated in a manner which depends on the research project. Then the claimed points for valid results are examined for anomalous (excessively high or low compared to other machines computing the same or equivalent work unit) values and adjusted accordingly. The servers assign the resulting adjusted point values to the member (and team) for each of the returned work units. This process eliminates the ability for malicious users to tamper with results and artificially claim higher points for their work.
What is a trickle up message?
A trickle up message is when your device sends a message back to World Community Grid at certain processing milestones to inform us that you’re still making progress on the current research task. Along with intermediate results sent to us by your device, we use this information to:
- Validate your work up to that point and grant credit accordingly;
- Determine whether sufficient progress is being made by your device or whether the task should be handed over to another volunteer.
What are the workunit deadlines?
A workunit deadline is the number of days you have to complete a workunit and return to the grid servers.
We have workunit deadlines so that the research will continue to move forward in a timely fashion. Currently the workunit deadlines are set at 10 days for most World Community Grid research projects. Some projects have different deadlines which could be as short as 1 day.
10 Day Workunit Deadline Exception: If you receive a replacement workunit that was generated as a result of a workunit result error from another members computer, then your workunit will have a shorter deadline. In particular, if the original deadline was 10 days, then the shortened deadline will be about 4 days.
If a workunit is not returned by the deadline, our grid servers will send out another copy of the workunit to another member. A member may receive credit for the overdue workunit if it is returned within 1 days of the deadline.
What is unique about how research tasks are managed for FightAIDS@Home – Phase 2? How does this impact how work will be distributed to volunteers?
The simulations researchers need to carry out are typically very long running and complex, each of which would take several months to run on a single device. Instead, researchers split up each simulation for a given drug candidate into shorter running research tasks: much smaller and more manageable pieces. These pieces of work can be run independently and simultaneously on a volunteer devices.
However for FightAIDS@Home – Phase 2, the research tasks within a single drug candidate simulation are dependent on each other where the output of one task is used as the input to the next. This means longer research tasks within each drug candidate simulation which can’t be run simultaneously.
To handle this complexity, we are using two different, but related mechanisms called trickle messaging and intermediate uploads to allow us to track your progress through a research task and manage the handover of that task from one volunteer to the next to get it completed in the shortest time possible. This way, we can track the progress of the long simulations to ensure that computations are not delayed or lost, while the researchers get the valuable results back as quickly as possible. In addition, volunteers acquire their credits sooner too.
Why did my device stop processing a research task? And what is a trickle down message?
Using the information your device intermittently sends to us during the processing of a research task, we determine the likelihood of your device finishing the task before the completion deadline. If we determine that you are very likely to miss that deadline or you have already missed the deadline, we would send your device a trickle down message to instruct it to stop working on that research task and we then pass it along on to another volunteer.
There are two types of trickle down messages:
- Soft stop: Instruction for your device to continue until the next milestone before stopping the computation of the current research task. This happens when your device is not making sufficient progress on the current calculation. We would then hand over your partial result to another volunteer to continue working on.
- Hard stop: Instruction for your device to stop working on the current research task immediately. This happens when you have already passed the processing deadline without sending in the final full result or that there may be a communication error in sending us your progress. In this case, we would hand over the research task from the point of your last intermediate milestone to another volunteer to resume working on.
In either case, you will be awarded credit for the work you completed up to the point of the last checkpoint.
This mechanism allows work to be completed quicker and for the researchers to receive valuable results sooner.
What are Project and Recruitment Badges?
Project badges recognize the contribution that a member has made to a research project running on World Community Grid, and recruitment badges recognize the member's contribution to introducing new volunteers to World Community Grid. All available project badges may be viewed here and all available recruitment badges may be viewed here.
Badges appear on a member's My Contribution page and next to their name in the forums.
Project Badges: There are 11 levels of badges awarded based upon how much computing time a member has contributed to each project:
Recruitment Badges: There are 5 levels of badges awarded based on how many new people a member has recruited to World Community Grid:
Members receive credit towards recruitment badges when someone signs up for World Community Grid using that member's unique recruitment URL and begins contributing computing power. You can get your recruitment URL and see which members you've recruited on your My Contribution page.
Recruitment badges are different from project badges in that they must be maintained. Recruited members must actively contribute computing power (return a result at least every 30 days) to count towards a member's recruitment badge. If an inactive recruited member becomes active again, they will once again count towards the recruitment total of the member who introduced them to World Community Grid.
How do I create a Team Challenge?
As the captain of a team, you may create as many Team Challenges as you want; the only requirement is that they have different names so members can tell them apart from other Team Challenges.
To create a Team Challenge, go to My Contribution and click on My Team in the lefthand navigation. Just under the Team Information, you'll see the Team Control Panel with an Issue Team Challenge button. Click the button to be taken to the Issue Team Challenge page.
Once on the Issue Team Challenge page, you start by picking a name for your Team Challenge. After that, decide if you want your Team Challenge to be open to all teams, or if you want to choose which teams to invite. If you want an Open Challenge, check the box next to "Open Challenge?"
Next up, pick the dates for your Team Challenge. The Start Date must be at least one day in the future, but not more than 30 days away. The End Date must be at least one day after the Start Date, but not more than 180 days after the Start Date.
Once you've chosen the dates, select what type of Team Challenge you'd like. The choices are Points, Run Time, and Results Returned, or an Increase in one of Points, Run Time, or Results Returned. For more in the "increase" challenges, read this FAQ.
Next choose whether or not you want to allow Late Joiners; that is, allow teams to join the challenge after the Start Date. This applies to teams that are invited as well as for Open challenges. Teams that join a challenge after the Start Date will only receive credit for statistics after they join the challenge.
Last but not least, you may invite other teams to participate in your Team Challenge. You may invite teams even if your are issuing an Open Challenge. If you are issuing a Closed Challenge you must invite at least one team.
To invite teams, just search for the name of the team you want to invite, and click the link to "Invite This Team." For more general searches, only the first 25 teams are returned. If this happens, try being a little more specific in your search.