OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home

[sven]

It a "milliard"

See http://www.jimloy.com/math/billion.htm for all sorts of other international number fun...

[Thermodyne]

I hit 10,000 units over the week end. Only 6900 and 20 more to get past.

Your credit:
Name (and URL) Thermodyne
Results Received 10075
Total CPU Time 5.397 years
Average CPU Time per work unit 4 hr 41 min 34.2 sec
Average results received per day 20.15
Last result returned: Mon Nov 11 19:35:14 2002 UTC
Registered on: Fri Jun 29 21:45:58 2001 UTC
View Registration Class
SETI@home user for: 1.370 years
View User Profile
Your group info:
You belong to the group named: Space Empires
You are not currently the founder of any teams.

Your rank: (based on current workunits received)

Your rank out of 4080972 total Users is: 6920th place.
The number of Users who have this rank: 2
You have completed more work units than 99.830% of our Users.

User Certificates
Download 10,000 Workunit Certificate
Download 7,500 Workunit Certificate
Download 5,000 Workunit Certificate
Download 2,500 Workunit Certificate
Download 1,000 Workunit Certificate
Download 750 Workunit Certificate
Download 500 Workunit Certificate
Download 250 Workunit Certificate
Download 100 Workunit Certificate

[Trajan]

I re-installed SETI@Home on my office machine and will add it to my old AMD 150MHZ machine, at home, which I generally never turn off.

[Ragnarok]

Ok, I've heard about this Seti@home stuff long enough. I'm curious now. Exactly what is it and what do you do? How does it work etc...

[Mudshark]

Ragnarok,

From the seti web site;
SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is a scientific effort seeking to determine if there is intelligent life outside Earth. SETI researchers use many methods. One popular method, radio SETI, listens for artificial radio signals coming from other stars. SETI@home is a radio SETI project that lets anyone with a computer and an Internet connection participate.

[Suicide Junkie]

What happens is that you download a small program, and it will run in the background while your computer is on.
It does a pretty good job of only using your idle processor time, so it will slow down or stop its work while you run some other application.

It will first download a chunk of raw data, and then grind away looking for patterns.
After roughly 10,000 Mhz-hours, it will finish, send the results back, and get another unit to work on.

If you're on a high-speed connection, you can set it to autmatically connect. If you're on dialup, it is probably best to have it wait. In that case, you will see the icon blink, and when you're connected, you can click it and press "connect now..." to send the results.

The total work done is tracked by email address, so if you have multiple machines, you can enter the smae address into the settings, and they will all count towards your ranking.

[Ragnarok]

Oh, ok, thanks for the answers. Sounds interesting.