[H-GEN] SETI at home

Harry Phillips hfphillips at iname.com
Tue Jul 27 05:37:28 EDT 1999


(Note reply-to: being general at humbug.org.au vs Harry Phillips <hfphillips at iname.com>)

Ok for those of you who haven't gone to http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ and
read the FAQ.

1. You download a work unit of ~370k. approx 5min with a 28.8 modem.
2. You then do 370+Million calculations on that WU. (mmm those figures seem too
similar)
3. When it is finished it waits until you are connected to the internet to
upload the result and download the next WU. (Actually it checks every hour)
4. You do all the calculations offline, so bandwidth and traffic aren't very
much.
5. Team HUMBUG could do with some more members. (Actually this last one isn't
found on the FAQ page)

I was not aware there was a team HUMBUG, and by the look of the member list I
don't think many people on this list were either. I have since joined.

Regards
Harry

PS. Just to make a comparison.
My home PC:		Pentium 100 + Linux + 1 WU = ~38hrs
My PC's at Work		Pentium 233 + Windoze +1 WU = ~38hrs
MS really hobble the power of the PC don't they!

On Tue, 27 Jul 1999, Michael Anthon wrote:
> (Note reply-to: being general at humbug.org.au vs Michael Anthon <mca at tams.com.au>)
> 
> Although I would dearly love to participate in this, the volume charges
> really are a killer.    I would really like to get a real figure for the
> amount of data I'd be chewing up.  Rob, how fast does the K6-233 you
> mentioned process RC5 blocks?  My machines are currently doing about 5,500
> kkeys/sec overall and I'm wondering what this would translate to in $/month
> if I switch to seti at home.
> 
> Umm... without checking if my maths is right, it be something like 
> $/month=(5500/k6-233-rc5-rate)*356000/1000000*0.19*30  [1]
> 
> Cheers
> Michael A.
> 
> [1] In case you are not aware, a Telstra megabyte is 10^6 bytes, not 2^20
> bytes
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Martin Pool [mailto:martinp at mincom.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, 27 July 1999 10:02 AM
> To: general at lists.humbug.org.au
> Subject: Re: [H-GEN] SETI at home
> 
> 
> (Note reply-to: being general at humbug.org.au vs Martin Pool
> <martinp at mincom.com>)
> 
> Rob Kearey wrote:
> 
> > > Perhaps they could use a more efficient format but since the data is
> > > essentially random it can't be compressed.  This may be a problem if
> > > you're concerned about volume or connection time charges.
> > 
> > Well, let's see:
> > 
> > -rw-rw-r--   1 robk     robk       356281 Jul 26 15:00 work_unit.txt
> > -rw-rw-r--   1 robk     robk       270208 Jul 27 09:48 work_unit.txt.bz2
> > -rw-rw-r--   1 robk     robk       270485 Jul 27 09:47 work_unit.txt.gz
> > 
> > Seems to compress OK to me - I'd call 86k a worthwhile reduction. I
> > accuse you of lies and perdition.
> 
> Not guilty, your worship.  That comes under "more efficient format"
> because IIRC the data is base64 encoded.  It still seems like a
> worthwhile feature request.
> 
> --
> Martin
> 
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