Credit
Your node earns credit for the answers it computes for other people. Credit is recognition: a number on the network page and in statistics files in the format BOINC projects use. It is not money, there is no token, and it cannot be exchanged for anything. AIs@home is not affiliated with or endorsed by BOINC or any BOINC project; we only use the same unit and file format.
How much
Section titled “How much”Credit follows the GPU time a node gives. It is anchored to BOINC’s unit, the cobblestone (1/200 of a day on a computer doing one billion operations a second): generating one token of the 27-billion-parameter model takes about 54 billion operations, which is 0.125 credit.
| Per token | Credit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Output (generated) | 0.125 | Generating is what keeps a GPU busy: one token at a time |
| New prompt | 0.0125 | Reading a prompt goes about ten times as fast per token or more |
| Cached prompt | 0.00125 | Your node just read it for the same person and keeps it in memory |
A node that generates one answer at a time, all day without a pause (about 46 tokens a second on an RTX 3090), would earn roughly 500,000 credit a day. Real nodes earn far less: they wait for requests most of the time.
Credit is not comparable between projects; BOINC says the same about its own projects.
Who counts it
Section titled “Who counts it”The gateway counts every token itself, with the model’s own tokenizer: the prompt it sent your node and the answer it passed on. What a node reports about itself is not used. A prompt counts as cached up to the part your node served the same person within the last ten minutes; the node’s own claim about its cache is ignored.
No credit for:
- answers to your own account (your own chats and API keys on your own node);
- answers that failed, or that a safety check stopped.
Today, total and recent average
Section titled “Today, total and recent average”Your account page shows credit for today (UTC), in total, and the recent average: BOINC’s formula, credit per day with a half-life of one week. It follows the rate your node earns at, and fades when the node is off.
Public or anonymous
Section titled “Public or anonymous”You are anonymous by default: your credit counts in the totals only, and nobody sees your name or an id. To appear on the leaderboard and in the statistics files, set a username on your account page. Setting it is your consent to show it publicly with your credit; clear it to disappear again from the next update. Usernames are unique, 3 to 32 characters, and cannot be web addresses.
Statistics files
Section titled “Statistics files”The gateway publishes credit in BOINC’s statistics format (the files BOINC’s db_dump
writes) at /stats/: tables.xml, user.gz (volunteers with a username),
host.gz (their nodes, by number) and team.gz (no teams yet). They are rebuilt at most once
an hour. BOINC statistics sites could read them; none does yet.
Not yet
Section titled “Not yet”- No cross-project ids (CPIDs) and so no Gridcoin. Linking a BOINC identity needs a proof that it is yours; a typed-in CPID proves nothing. This comes later, if at all.
- No checks of answers yet. Credit is for work the gateway saw pass through, not proof that an answer was right. Like any leaderboard, it can be gamed, for example with a second account; that is one reason it stays recognition only.