OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home

DavidG · #1 September 28th, 2002, 11:32 PM

Are you guys all running Quad Pentiums X's or what? I joined and my first unit took 44 hrs' to process!! I didn't think my 1Ghz PIII was that slooow! I want Imperator Fyron' or Thermodyne's computer.

Baron Munchausen · #2 September 29th, 2002, 02:44 AM

No, you just need to learn the secrets of SETI@Home fanaticism.

First of all, what Version are you using? The Win95/98 screen saver? Set it to blank the screen after 0 minutes. No, not your screen saver timeout in the Windows settings. The blank screen setting in the actual SETI program. The pretty graphics use as much CPU as the actual calculations. By turning them off you'll save a lot of power. You'll probably more than double the speed at which you finish a work unit just by doing that. A 1 Ghz P III is actually fairly powerful. You could check the box to have it running all the time in the background, I think. I have an 800 Mhz Duron and it's no problem for me to have it running all the time.

Now after that you have to consider how you have configured your computer and what else is running on it. Sounds are cute, but use MUCH CPU time playing unless you've got a fancy sound subsystem with hardware buffering. It would be wise to turn sounds off. Lots of 'harmless' programs that load up and sit in memory waiting for you to do something are actually using a noticable portion of your CPU power. What have you got in your task bar? Think real hard about whether you need those things. Is it really that hard to just go to the menu or desktop icon to activate that program? Remove as many as possible.

There are some more obscure tweaks that will give you a tiny percentage more, like using lower color depth on your screen. But the best improvement will come from not using the screen saver Version at all. Get the Win NT Version, which DOES run in Win95/98, and use that instead. (Then color depth doesn't matter!) It's about 10 percent faster than the Screensaver even with the graphics turned off. I think you will find that everyone on the SE IV group has been using the NT Version for a long time now.

I suppose I should rejoin the group but I hate the competitiveness of it. It's supposed to be 'fun' and/or 'charity' in that you're donating spare computer power to a good non-profit cause, but it's become a huge competitve thing for so many people now. There are entire farms of computers in some people's basements dedicated to SETI and nothing else. Some 'gift of spare CPU time'...

But at least they've got the largest accumulated computing project in history now. Just wait till SETI@HOME II starts up for the southern hemisphere...

[ September 29, 2002, 01:50: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

Thermodyne · #3 September 30th, 2002, 08:45 AM

Wow, I was wondering where all of the new people were coming from, so now I know. I don�t visit here very often. For the guys looking for faster unit times, run the 3.03 command line Version and a caching program like SetiDriver or one of the others. Then OC the heck out of every old system that you have lying around.

The team was started by one of the SE III masters, Paul Dionne/Minervan Necores Alliance. And while it is a small team, we have a pair of �%�rs, and should have 2 people over 10,000 units by Thanksgiving. So come on over and join up, we need all the help we can get

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/s...eam_73545.html

Fyron · #4 September 30th, 2002, 09:05 AM

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?

Suicide Junkie · #5 September 30th, 2002, 03:57 PM

The units are all the same size, but the amount of work done on them has increased in the Last year or two.

A while ago, IIRC, the SETI guys found that people were processing the units TOO fast, and they were going to run out, so they increased the detail of the analysis.

Thermodyne · #6 September 30th, 2002, 06:10 PM

Quote:

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.

Thermodyne · #7 September 30th, 2002, 06:21 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:

A while ago, IIRC, the SETI guys found that people were processing the units TOO fast, and they were going to run out, so they increased the detail of the analysis.

Not true, each unit is worked many times by many different systems, just to make sure that the results are reliable. This also eliminates the need to track lost units. Many of the units that are downloaded never get returned. The biggest problem we have had is when we used up the bandwidth at the UC Berkeley campus. It got real hard to send and receive work units for a few months. But all things must end, and after the first of the year the data from the northern hemisphere will be finished. There are a couple of new projects in the works, but it will remain to be seen if they will be as popular as seti@home is. They should hit 4,000,000 Users this week.

[ September 30, 2002, 17:23: Message edited by: Thermodyne ]