Tommy Atkinson replied:

Eeeeek, I can't stand it! Someone please tell me what is a
cobblestone. Have mercy, I'm going mad.

Tommy Atkinson

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/bb/bb4/bboard.cgi?action=viewthread&num=1954

Subject: Re: *Admin* ~ What happens to credits??
Message 18 of 43
Posted by ace_quaker User Profile  on Nov 28, 2002 at 21:21

 Well they might be converted into Cobblestones...

>>Computation credit
Each project gives you credit for the computations your computers performs for
the project. These credits are used to generate web-site "leaderboards" showing
individuals, teams, and categories (countries, CPU types, etc.) ranked by
credit.

BOINC's credit system is based on a "reference computer" that does

1 billion floating-point multiply/adds per second
1 billion integer multiply/adds per second
4 billion bytes per second of traffic to and from main memory (sequential, half
reads and half writes)
BOINC's unit of credit, the Cobblestone, is one day of CPU time on the
reference computer. (Credit should ideally reflect network transfer and disk
storage as well as computation. But it's hard to verify these activities, so
for now they aren't included.)
Each project maintains two types of credit:

Total credit: The total number of Cobblestones performed.
Recent average credit: The average number of Cobblestones per day performed
recently. This average decreases by a factor of two every week.
Both types of credit (total and recent average) are maintained for each user
and host.
<<


from http://boinc.berkeley.edu/credit.html

David Stites <david@dstites.net.invalid> wrote in message news:<Xns941F329A149A1daviddstitesnet@199.45.49.11>...

"Rizla" <nothere@noway.com> wrote in news:bnahtl$4kp$1
@titan.btinternet.com:

Hi all,

How long will it take to send an e-mail to 4,723,933 users?

How will the S@h server cope with 4,723,933 dowmloads?

Have been reading here:-
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/index.html

Find out what a 'Cobblestone' is.

How many Cobblestones would this produce?

Processing rate:  3.40 hour / work unit  (29.43 % / hour)
Processing speed:  333.12 MegaFLOPs / second
Processing efficiency:  9.29 CPU cycles / FLOP
Floating point operations to process:  4.10 TeraFLOPs


Results returned:  3042
Last result returned:  24/10/2003 06:59:44
Total CPU time:  1.86 yrs
Avg. CPU time:  5:21:52
Result interval:  12:24:49
CPU dedication:  43.2%
Rank:  67,022 of 4,723,933 (98.581%)
Users with this rank:  32

(SETI Spy data)

I think they are smart enough to space it out over weeks or months. Notify people in batches small enough to handle.

Name (and URL)  David Stites   Results Received  3179 Total CPU Time  3.832 years  SETI@home user for: 4.262 years Your rank out of 4725469 total users is:  63821st place.  The number of users who have this rank:  29  You have completed more work units than  98.649% of our users.