GPUGrid: 1Pflops milestone

So, according to BOINC statistics, all a project has to do to increase its G/T/PFlops production rate is to increase the amount of credit awarded per task - and there are some projects which have done that. That's the crazy world of statistics for you.

It's not statistics that are at fault, it's the way some people do statistics and what they do with the numbers they come up with. I once had respect for BOINC stats sites but that quickly ended when they started doing crazy stuff like deriving performance (FLOPS) from credits. They pander to the naive, like many politicians do, thereby reinforcing beliefs that have no foundation in reality.

And the real crime against scientific method is that BOINC themselves commit the same sin, in the top-right corner of the home page, and more dramatically on http://boinc.berkeley.edu/chart_list.php. How many of those GFLOPS statements would pass a floating-point benchmark audit?

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They have even added the numbers to the server status page. I find it hilarious because using the flops from the nVidia and AMD wiki pages, I estimated the Collatz flops as several petaFlops and that was several years ago. The BOINC numbers don't include GPUs, or if they do, they only rate them at 30% since SETI's code sucks and everything in BOINC is based on it matching SETI.

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