I wouldn't be too worried, Jeff7181, by the sounds of it, they're using a real metric, not something synthetic. There are a lot of ways to do this, including counting cycles, parts of a WU(Dnet does this by counting OGR nodes, even though the number in a WU can vary, and RC5-64 stats were broken down to single WU's), or some other method. I doubt SETI wants to get bogged down in synthetic metrics, so I'd place my bet on something accurate.