SETI@home

Hi,

Stephen Ryan has set up an IFAS group for seti@home

Visit setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/stats/team/team_69110.html and add yourself if you run seti@home.

Currently at 2115 units.

Cheers,
~Al

Just joined. Now up to 4154 units. totalling 5.54 years of processing time

Just joined. Now up to 4154 units. totalling 5.54 years of processing time

Cool, I had to `test some machines` before christmas so my score went up quite a bit.

Cheers,
~Al

albert,
i was wondering what sort of machines you were testing i assume some sort of sun machines anyway judging from your average time they apppear to be significantly faster than wintel ones.
stephen.

i was wondering what sort of machines you were testing i assume some sort of sun machines anyway judging from your average time they apppear to be significantly faster than wintel ones.

I'm glad you asked

They are RISC based CPU's so are significantly different from the x86 ones in PC's. One factor of this is that they do not need to run as fast to get the same work done. Though your average top of the line PC chip will generally be a bit faster than your latest SPARC chip.

The operating system does make a difference also, and even though the setiathome code is optimised for PC architectures, a Sun box running solaris is generally faster at computing the units than a `faster` cpu with windows.

The machine I have seti running on constantly is a failry modest Sun V480 with 4 x 900MHz with 8Gb of memory (this is what Sun calls an entry-level server ), and I have one instance of seti running on each processor. The machine is also my webserver, oracle server, other-non-oracle database server, install server, DNS server, and it runs the lab backups too and hasnt needed to be rebooted since I installed it in September, so its not just sitting there running seti!

When we have a break in test runs I let seti run on another couple of machines:
a 16 x 400MHz CPU, 16Gb Mem (E6500 machine), and
a 8 x 900 MHz CPU, 16Gb Mem (V880 machine).
Again with an instance of seti running on each processor, since that is better than trying to get seti to share CPU's (which it is not designed to do).

So my single unit completion time may actually be slower than someone with a newish PC w/linux, but at times I am computing about 20 units at the same time on only 3 machines.

I use other machines as well sometimes, but the ones i mentioned above are the most impressive.

Cheers,
~Al

Show Off (Said in admiration of course)