OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home

[Thermodyne]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
Wait... that low average CPU time per work unit is a good thing? I wasn't sure what it meant. Are all of the work units the same size?

No two units are the same. The first Version had work units that were faster to work than the Version we have now, something to do with adding Gaussians I think. So the peeps that got in at the start had some quick units to work on, but with slower systems. The units we work with now vary by as much as 25% depending on the angle of the work unit. I won’t go into all of that here; it has been covered in detail on the seti forum. The key to high output is to have a bunch of systems doing the work, but a few fast systems can put out a lot of units. My slowest system is a P II 300 at about 14:30 a unit. And on the other end of the scale I have a P4 @ 2.8Ghz that does a unit every two hours.