are they the amount of Flops that you do or something?
or are they ONLY for fun?

Currently they're meaningless (you can alter how many you get), but they're testing a system where they relate to the number of protein models calculated.

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Whilst technicaly Miles is right, I would like to say that the original intention of the boinc credits is to indicate how much work you've done.

The credits are in a unit of "cobblestones", and they are simply a way to indicate who has done how much work. At the moment, I don't think there's anything you can actually "use" your cobblestones for, other than achieve a rank on some statistical lists, for example in www.boincstats.com or one of many other statistics sites.

There is some controversy about the way the points are calculated and more specifically that there are Boinc clients that allow you to run an "optimized" benchmark that gives a higher score for your machine, which fools the credit system to give your results a bigger credit than it really should have. The Rosetta team are working on fixing this up so that for Rosetta, a fair credit is given. Rosetta is more sensitive to "cheating" because it only calculates one result ONCE, whilst other projects use "multiple results averaged" to get the scoring for a result, and thus someone "fixing" their machine will not only inflate their own score, but everyone else who's calculated the same workunit too, in the averaging process.

I hope this helps.

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Mats

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Whilst technicaly Miles is right, I would like to say that the original intention of the boinc credits is to indicate how much work you've done.

The credits are in a unit of "cobblestones", and they are simply a way to indicate who has done how much work. At the moment, I don't think there's anything you can actually "use" your cobblestones for, other than achieve a rank on some statistical lists, for example in www.boincstats.com or one of many other statistics sites.

There is some controversy about the way the points are calculated and more specifically that there are Boinc clients that allow you to run an "optimized" benchmark that gives a higher score for your machine, which fools the credit system to give your results a bigger credit than it really should have. The Rosetta team are working on fixing this up so that for Rosetta, a fair credit is given. Rosetta is more sensitive to "cheating" because it only calculates one result ONCE, whilst other projects use "multiple results averaged" to get the scoring for a result, and thus someone "fixing" their machine will not only inflate their own score, but everyone else who's calculated the same workunit too, in the averaging process.

I hope this helps.

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Mats

Just a little comment that complements your answer.

The nature of what is done at Rosetta doent require multiple quorums. As a matter of fact multiple quorums in Rosetta are a waste of computing ressources.

Whilst technicaly Miles is right, I would like to say that the original intention of the boinc credits is to indicate how much work you've done.

The credits are in a unit of "cobblestones", and they are simply a way to indicate who has done how much work. At the moment, I don't think there's anything you can actually "use" your cobblestones for, other than achieve a rank on some statistical lists, for example in www.boincstats.com or one of many other statistics sites.

There is some controversy about the way the points are calculated and more specifically that there are Boinc clients that allow you to run an "optimized" benchmark that gives a higher score for your machine, which fools the credit system to give your results a bigger credit than it really should have. The Rosetta team are working on fixing this up so that for Rosetta, a fair credit is given. Rosetta is more sensitive to "cheating" because it only calculates one result ONCE, whilst other projects use "multiple results averaged" to get the scoring for a result, and thus someone "fixing" their machine will not only inflate their own score, but everyone else who's calculated the same workunit too, in the averaging process.

I hope this helps.

--
Mats

Just a little comment that complements your answer.

The nature of what is done at Rosetta doent require multiple quorums. As a matter of fact multiple quorums in Rosetta are a waste of computing ressources.

I completley agree, and thanks for clarifying. There's no reason for doing the same work twice, as the "lowest" result can be quite quickly confirmed to be correct or not, and the "lowest" result is the only one that is scientifically valuables (it's just that it's almost impossible to figure out how to get there - but once you DO get there, it's quite easy to repeat it and say "Yes, it's correct" or "no, that's not a correct result").

Other projects have a different problem situation: Each calculation is just a tiny part of a much bigger picture, and the calculation to find the actual result is what takes a long time. Doing this two or three times to confirm that each of the calculations is correct is critical to the entire project being able to confidently say that the overall result is valid.

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Mats

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are they the amount of Flops that you do or something?
or are they ONLY for fun?

Scott, welcome to Rosetta!

You've happened upon a sensitive subject at the moment :) But, yes 100,000 credits is equal to 1 Tera FLOP, or 1 trillion floating point calculations. This is a rough measure of how much computing power you've contributed to the project. Their primary purpose is to be used as a measure, and for the fun of seeing the numbers increase over time. They really have no other value, other than to spur competition amongst participants and teams.

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