Points


When are points and statistics updated?

World Community Grid points and statistics are updated twice a day. This occurs at 00:00 and 12:00 UTC. This includes all statistics on World Community Grid except for Team Statistics.

Team Statistics are updated once a day at 00:00 UTC.


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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.


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Why are points not updated even though new work units have been downloaded?

Points are awarded for results when they have been successfully processed on your device. They are awarded after they have been returned to our servers and successfully passed validation. You may learn more about validation here. If you want to check the status of your result(s), you may view your results status page. Additionally, point totals are only updated on the website twice a day, so there can be up to a 12 hour delay between when your result is validated and the points appear on our website.


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What are points?

Your device's contribution is shown in three measures: points, total run time and results returned. The term points is simply used as a way of measuring the amount of computation your device has contributed. For instance, if your device works for three days on one work unit, or in those same three days completes five work units, you will accumulate the same number of points assuming that your device worked at about the same level of effort in each scenario.


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How are points used?

The calculation of Points is the method World Community Grid uses to measure your contribution to individual research projects running on World Community Grid. Points are one method for competitive comparison on the stats pages.


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Why are points on the agent and the web different?

World Community Grid in the past ran two types of agents. A United Devices (UD Windows) agent and a BOINC (Windows/Linux/Mac) agent. Today, World Community Grid only runs the BOINC agent. Points contributed by both of the agents will be part of a member's total on the website. However, only points contributed by BOINC agents will be shown on the BOINC agents. The points previously earned by a UD agent only appear on the website. Additionally, due to differences in how the agents computed points, BOINC points are multiplied by 7 when they are imported into the website. Thus if you earned 5 BOINC points, you will see 35 website points.


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What is validation?

World Community Grid is a volunteer computing grid. This means that work is being sent to computing devices that are outside the control of World Community Grid. Most devices that perform this work are reliable. However, there are a few devices that are not reliable due to things such as users over-clocking their machines, memory errors, disk errors, CPU errors or viruses being present. This means that the results returned need to be validated to make sure that they represent the correct answer.

We perform three different types of validation at World Community Grid:
 

  • Redundant Computations: In this type of validation, two copies of the work unit are sent to members devices. Once both results are returned, they are compared to ensure that the results are identical. If they are, then the result is accepted. If they are not identical, then additional copies are sent until several devices agree on what the result should be. This policy establishes a very high level of confidence in the reliability of the results. Mapping Cancer Markers and Uncovering Genome Mysteries are examples of projects that use this technique.
  • Single Validation - Type 1: In this type of validation, only one copy of a work unit will be sent to a device if the device is "trusted", that is, if it has been participating long enough and returning good results. If the device is not trusted, then it will still be assigned the work unit, but a second copy will be sent to another device and the rules for redundant computation above apply. As a precaution, the research code computes certain items that allow us to quickly check on the server if the computation is likely to have finished correctly. Additionally, trusted devices are randomly sampled to have their results double-checked. These techniques provide a very high level of confidence in the reliability of the results. FightAIDS@Home and Outsmart Ebola Together are examples of projects that have used this technique.
  • Single Validation - Type 2: This is similar to Single Validation - Type 1 except that due to the fact that different results are generated each time the work unit is run (due to the research techniques applied in the application), we send out many copies of each work unit. We currently do not have any research projects utilizing this technique.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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