We are making a change to the way that the claimed credit field is calculated for BOINC clients. About three months ago there was a change to the BOINC server software and a new field was added that stores the recent history of granted credit per cpu second. In essence this field provides the average credit that your computer was awarded over the past 10-15 workunits per cpu second. We are going to use this field to check the reasonableness of the credit being claimed by the client. If the claim from the client differs somewhat from the historical granted credit then the two will be blended together to generate the claimed credit. If the claim from the client is substantially different then historical granted credit will be used to generate the claimed credit.

In the strong majority cases (over 95%) this will have little to no effect on the claimed credit. There are a few cases where this will result in a change:

1) Members whose clients claim much higher then normal. These users were previously subjected to a penalty when their results were validated and were only awarded half the credit that the other results in the workunit were awarded. With this change, these members claimed credits will be more reasonable and thus they will be awarded the same credit as other results in the workunits.

2) Linux users. This change will help spread the effect of the new benchmark changes in the BOINC 5.8 client. There are enough Linux computers using the 5.8 client now that this change will help to bring up the claimed credit for Linux computers using the 5.2 and 5.4 clients. Additionally, we will be releasing the Human Proteome Folding – Phase 2 project on Linux later today. In this project, the results from Linux computers will be returning results in the same workunit as Windows and Mac computers. Thus the granted credit will be consistent between the platforms which will help raise the historical granted field for the BOINC 5.2 and 5.4 clients.