🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello Christopher,

I've been involved with the seti@home for about 83 hours now. Since I
am head of IT for a mid-sized company, I have a lot of computing power
at my disposal.  One thing I have noticed on the NT stations is that
seti@home puts CPU utilization up to 100%.   If it is running on my
workstation (Compaq Deskpro PII 350 with 160mb RAM, WIn NT 4 SP3) I
could not type this letter.  There are not enough CPU cycles left to
allow me to work quickly enough.   I have also installed the SETI@home
software on several non-mission critical servers.  These are my
observations:

SETI@HOME is faster on WIN98, next WIN NT workstation and slowest on
WIN NT servers.  If there was a way to disable graphics (running
minimized I suppose), processing would be faster.  Screen saver
feature is nice, however, when I begin using the computer SETI@HOME
does not shut down.  Finally, if SETI@HOME had a start up and shut
down time setting, I would run this software on several more servers
that do nothing outside of business hours.

Now about the usefulness of this project.  Let's keep in mind that the
idea if finding intelligence out there in space is (to begin with) an
astronomical remote possibility. Next, we should consider the fact
that a tiny fraction of the entire spectrum is being received by the
Arecibo radio telescope....then this data is further reduced to a
small portion of this already narrow section of the spectrum (2.5 MHz
out of the 100 MHz bandwidth).  Finally, the Arecibo dish can only see
a very tiny portion of the sky.   When you consider these facts, the
chances are infinitely small in finding intelligence.

Why am I participating?  Because I'm curious just like everyone else.

I expect to process 7 data sets every 60 hours (on 5 systems so far).
This seems quite slow and I wondering if this software has been
optimized.  I could dedicate about 15 systems to this project if this
software had a start/stop time capabilities.

Shawn



cjones@ix.cs.uoregon.edu (Christopher Michael Jones) wrote:

>
>What do you mean?  It's working fine, and the most likely other uses
>for that computing power is 1) doing nothing 2) playing video games
>3) lookin' at porn 4) reading e-mail, and 4) playing solitare or some
>other crappy games.
>
>Also, there is something very special about "doing nothing" that 
>needs elaboration.  When you are actually using your computer (as
>I am right now typing this message), you are not using it's entire
>capabilities.  The computer can (and does) only give you a fraction
>of it's powers when it's not taxed.  In other words, the 
>"cpu utilization" is less than 100%.  An idle process like SETI@home
>can take that extra power without you even noticing a change in the
>response / speed of the computer.  Right now, I'm running several
>programs, a browser, a terminal emulator, winamp, some other stuff.
>And even when I'm browsing the web or reading email / news, while
>simultaneously playing music on my computer, SETI@home is sitting
>in the background sopping up cpu cycles like a sponge.  And there
>is plenty of extra computing power to be mopped up, it gets a good
>80% of the cpu a lot of the time, even with all the other stuff I
>do.  These cpu cycles would be completely wasted if there were no
>background process like SETI@home.  They would be spent doing things
>like monitoring the mouse position, etc. over and over and over
>and over again, even though it is unnecessary to spend so many
>cpu cycles on such things (since normal operating system functions
>don't take up that much cpu power).
>
>
>Neil Rivers (nrivers@mcb.net) wrote:
>> Although I admire the concept of enlisting the help of the world's home
>> computers to analyse the SETI data, I can't help thinking all that
>> processing power could be put to better use. May be the real value of the
>> project is it will inspire someone to come up with a more tangible goal in
>> some other field.
>
>You're not one of them anti-SETI people are you?
>
>Anyway, I find it interesting that someone would bad mouth a privately
>funded all volunteer project.  It doesn't take nothin' that people
>don't give it.