Signed up.

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
3,164
Location
Leicester
Hi,

Just signed up to OcUK seti team from my old team TPR. I seem to have come in at 317 so have some work to do.... lol. :D

One question,

How are these new fangled credits worked out on the seti enhanced client? Is it still the case that more overclock = more credit? I remember when it was all about saving it all up and going for one huge dump. Those were the days. :D

Cheers.

Ant.
 
Folding is where its at these days. You still have units and points, but its for medical research rather than searching for aliens and the stats are better.

Of course you can still do seti if you want and some people do, but its not the most popular project anymore. And therefore folding tends to be more fun as there's more competition.
 
Leave him alone Joe! Poor guy comes in to ask an innocent question about SETI and you jump out of the shrubery brandishing a F@H leaflet :p Not saying he is wrong though! ;)

I don't know anything about SETI but someone who does should be along shortly.

SiriusB
 
The new points system is based on how fast your machine is (a quick benchmark is run frequently) and how long your machine takes to complete a WU. Your result is then compared with 2 or 3 others and you receive some sort of average of all 3 or 4 claimed credits (the specific number of WUs and type of average depends on which project it is typically)

It's all very scientific and supposedly more fair than having fixed credit but at the end of the day it means you have a very predictable output - long gone are the days of stashing and huge dumps (I'm sure you'll agree that's where most of the fun of Seti Classic came from) :o

As Joe has already said Folding@Home seems to be the most popular project here at the moment though don't be fooled - there are still plenty of people doing many other projects (SETI included) if it's just not your thing


Welcome to the team :)
 
Points on SETI enhanced is quite a bone of contention.
WU is sent to 4 computers, 1st 3 results are averaged to give award of points.
MAC's seem to get loads easilly as do C2D's
My 4600 x 2 get 60ish points for 8hr unit. Climate change gives 258 for about 12hrs [1 year calculation] but WU are huge 2200hrs:eek:
Folding gets my vote & more processing power in 2007:)
 
Seti uses the boinc platform. Unlike the old classic seti, there is no means of queuing up WUs the whole idea is that they have a deadline for crunching and return. That prevents queues of WUs as if you don't return on time you wont get any credit. Credit is an average based on at least 3 crunchers returning the WUs within the time limit. The 3 crunchers minimum enables the results to be compared and verified to rule out computing errors.

There are multiple projects available under boinc - seti, climate prediction, rosetta to name a few. Most users will sign up to a couple. This if one project does have connectivity issues with their servers, the second one will keep going so you know you are still doing something worthwhile.
 
in the new enhanced SETI the points are much more based on how much work is done (eg so many points per gigaflops) and not the benchmark anymore. i am not sure if the benchmark is used for anything now. IMHO the new system is much fairer. THere are some optimised SETI applications here.

http://lunatics.at/index.php

there are different ones depending on your CPU and if it uses SSE, SSE2 etc.

these will increase the speed of processing the WU, so do more science, and give more points.

also you can stash WU by telling BOINC only to connect to the internet every 5 days or so, this is handy as it allows for any outages of the SETI severs (happens once in a while).

glad to have another SETI fan in the house. :)
 
If you want good stats, check out BOINCstats which are the most comprehensive of all. Pie charts and everything!

The BOINC benchmark is still used to calculate how much work to download to fit the set connection frequency. In other words, if you set BOINC to connect to the network every 5 days, it uses the benchmark calculation to guess how many work units it will need to download to give 5 days worth of work. And whilst stashing isn't possible like it used to be, you can still have ten days worth of work cached for a bit of a dump.
 
Cheers for the info and welcome guys. I am stoking up on WU's now so hopefully will have a nice dump in a week or so!

Will keep my eye on this Folding business but it's seti for now.

Cheers! :)
 
questions!

Hi guys, i read this thread with interest.

I have seti running on my laptop at home and i have recently added my girlfriends pc to my account so i have two pcs showing on my account.

I noticed there is a time limit for the 2 work units downloaded to my girlfriends pc. If she doesnt use the pc very often and the work unit doesnt get completed in time what happens?

Also if there was an error in the WU once completed what happens? Worried that the small chance there could be something interesting in one of the units but it got missed or do they account for this somehow?

Overall, was it worth me adding the second pc to my account if it doesnt get used a lot?

thanks guys
 
Don't worry about getting errors (unless you are getting lots due to extreme overclocking or an unstable PC), there send the same WU out to three different people and then compare the results, which means they won't miss anything.... but you won't get the full credit for the WU.

in seti the WU are relatively small (new machines take just a few hours, even an old one should do one in 24 hours), and the time limits longish so you shouldn't have any problems finishing on time, also the software knows how long the machine is on and will estimate if things will finish in time, ie next time it might only download one WU if it thinks you won't get through two.
 
Back
Top Bottom