Join The FQuest Team -- SETI Project

[Deb]

Ok all... looking for a team effort here to help find ET :D

Would really love for you all to pick up a free screen saver (that's pretty kewl to look at) and join our newly created FutureQuest Team for the SETI Project! (yes the search for extraterrestrial intelligence *g*)

Step 1: Home Page and info http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

Step 2: Download the appropriate version for your computer... (links on top of the home page)

Step 3: Go through the simple install.. during installation you will "Create an Account". (let it run from here)

Step 4: Go to http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/account_area.html and click on "Change User Account Info" just to assure all is ok and how you want it... (you'll probably need to click on the link to receive your password.. they just email it to you)

Step 5: Go to http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgi?cmd=team_lookup&name=FutureQuest and click on "Join This Group"

Step 6: Join the group :D

Step 7: Keep an eye on our group and see if we either find ET or at least start gaining an edge on some of the other groups in the top 100 list of "Small Businesses" :)

We can also enjoy competing with each other a bit :þ

So..... whatcha think?[nbsp][nbsp]Am I just being silly here or will you join our lil group with me?[nbsp][nbsp]I think it could be a fun side project for some of us to team up on.... if you all get into it I'll even add it to our status page;)[nbsp][nbsp]if not.. well then ummmmm I'll ummmmm run SETI as my screen saver anyway :)

Deb
--
[nbsp]p.s. for those installing and curious.. I've got SETI set to run all the time in the background... it's not causing me any problems whatsoever and seems to take up very lil of my cpu ....

[Kathleen]

We're in :)[nbsp][nbsp]Well, THEY are in.[nbsp][nbsp]I'm an observer.

I want ET's reese'e pieces :)

[Deb]

LOL! You took first place fast! ;)

[Rich]

Joined! All previously found aliens have been transferred to group for credit.

Moulder

[Deb]

ROFL! Thanks ;)

This is gonna be "fun".. I can see that already :D

[tedloh]

Beam me up, Debbie!

Spearmaster

[Deb]

;)[nbsp][nbsp]I'm going to have to create us a stats page etc to keep track of who is who (weeee oooohhhhh *g*)

Wondering who LCI is -- WOW! 0 hr 40 min 17.6 sec -- curious what type of system it is running on :)

Deb
[nbsp]--
[nbsp][nbsp]I'm off to build a web page.. a wonder wonderful SETI page lol

[tedloh]

LOL!

Less than one day after you started us on this... Reuters reports that the project has one million users - could one of us be lucky 1 Million??

http://cnn.com/TECH/computing/9908/18/seti.reut/

All right, who's LCI with the Alpha chip... :)

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Ted (Chief Do-It-All)
Tygre Systems Co Ltd
Bangkok, Thailand, Land of Smiles :) :)
http://www.tygresystems.com (work in progress)
ted@tygresystems.com
[This message has been edited by tedloh (edited 08-19-99)]

[Dean B]

I'm in and 10% thru my first unit :)

40 mins ?![nbsp][nbsp]How many other lucky Questies have access to a CRAY I wonder ....

Dean.

[JoeRT]

I'm in![nbsp][nbsp]:D

[elite]

How long can I leave this running on the laptop, or can I leave the laptop on for a day straight w/o it damaging anything??

[elite]

MIght not have found ET but I am getting some high peaks.. One got up to:[nbsp][nbsp]37251287878814621000000.00 and yes the period is in the right spot... LOL propably something stupid like orbital dust but pretty neat for my first file :)

I took some screen shots if anyone wants one.. Just email me :) or ICQ me at 10271446

[Sam]

The bad thing about running seti@home on Linux is no pretty graphics. Anybody know of a way to see some fancy spectral power charts in unix land?

[MTDesigns]

Just joined :).
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Joi
http://www.myparentime.com

[elite]

FYI: Ed Bradburn from England became the millionth SETI@home user.

[andreas]

hi deb...

joined.
seti works at the office and at home.

:)

greetings
a n d r e a s

[Deb]

Kewlness! :)

Elite has started up a nice group over at http://www.elitecaraudio.com/seti/ I've a feeling his group will be going pretty strong!

I saw some links to UNIX interfaces at http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/links.html but haven't checked them out yet.[nbsp][nbsp]Scroll down to the bottom to find the list.

A lil something to note -- NEO is one of the new Dedicated Servers on-line for beta testing and pounding on... so those interested in the dedicated systems may want to keep an eye on him ;)

If anyone wants to hear what their listening to check out http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/audio.html

I'm having fun with it.... I'll be anxious to see if (when!) we get ourselves up to that top 100 list :D[nbsp][nbsp]

Thanks all... and keep an eye on the Status page as well(http://www.FutureQuest.net/Status/)[nbsp][nbsp]I'll be posting up our stats and the top runners etc ;)

Deb

[skyliner]

Good luck to you all. I'd join along if I weren't in a group already, promoting my little country. United ET hunters of Lithuania ;-). hm.

Skyliner

[elite]

See some of yall are running this pretty quick! What type of setups you guys have?

[Deb]

I'm on a PII 400 ... TeRRA on the other hand is on a 166 (I think his will average at about 100 hours each *g*)

Deb
[nbsp][nbsp]--
[nbsp][nbsp] chuga chuga choo chooo!


edit is due to me dreaming 450 when it's only a 400

[This message has been edited by Deb (edited 08-20-99)]

[elite]

Wow your speeds are great for a 400MHZ On my 400MHZ AMD k6-II its taking like 30 hours...

Oh well maybe its because my system sucks even though it was just upgraded including new mother board, processor, 128megs of ram, and video card....

The darn thing overheats *CPU* and crashes far to much...

I think im gonna get a AMD Athlon 500 system.. I have seen them right at around $1000.00 for a decent set minus monitor..
[This message has been edited by elite (edited 08-20-99)]

[Jacob Stetser]

What's with all those -elite people?

I feel dwarfed.

Oh, I'm averaging 21-22 hrs/block on a 233 machine. Pretty good, eh?

I've got it on 2 machines right now, so that's 2 blocks per 20-odd hours, as long as it's running. I want to be at the top (fat luck, eh Jake? :)

Jake


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icongarden.com/?fq (http://icongarden.com/?fq)
icongarden: making good ideas grow.

[Sam]

We have three computers currently looking for aliens, but the performance of one of them doesn't make sense:

PII450 / Linux - a little under 8 hours per work unit
P166 / Win98 - looks like 100 hours (not done with one unit yet)
PII366 / Win98 / laptop - around 60 hours per unit

That last one doesn't make sense - it seems that it should be cranking out its fast fourier transforms a little quicker than that. For the most part, nothing else has been running either. Any ideas?

[Deb]

Jacob -- We'll be giving "awards" to the "most patient" machines/people too ;)

Sam is the 166 running the graphical verision? If so, the RAM may have something to do with it too....

Elite -- Quite impressed with the involvement you've got with your users![nbsp][nbsp]'tis awesome to see!

Watching the FQ group grow has been blast![nbsp][nbsp]I'll be working on the pages for it this weekend :)

Deb

[elite]

Ya my laptops running it slow also :(

[Sam]

I thing a couple of things seem to help with number crunching speed:

- The graphical version sucks. Putting the alien finding machine in full-time mode seems to have help my slow laptop. When Deb suggested fiddling with the graphics, I was skeptical, since the computer in question has plenty of RAM, and the graphics aren't that fancy or updated that often. The downside is that you can't really do full-time processing if you have to actually use the computer, so aside from experimenting to see what's faster, I'll probably still use screensaver mode.
- I didn't mention in the last post that my PII450 is overclocked to a little over 500MHz. Since the unix version uses no graphics and not much memory, the speed increase should be pretty much proportional to the system clock. So, this is around a 10% increase in speed (til my cpu melts ;) ).

[tedloh]

LOL.[nbsp][nbsp]I doubt your PII450 will melt at 504 mhz...[nbsp][nbsp]my Celeron 300A has been working at 504mhz for seven months and never a problem.[nbsp][nbsp]Then again, I had my cover off and the room was cold most of the time... ;)

I wish I could get a non-graphical version for Windows.[nbsp][nbsp]I don't have the patience to watch that thing go - and I suspect a non-graphical version would speed things up by a factor of 3 or 4...

------------------
Ted (Chief Do-It-All)
Tygre Systems Co Ltd
Bangkok, Thailand, Land of Smiles :) :)
http://www.tygresystems.com (work in progress)
ted@tygresystems.com

[Deb]

In the Windows version go into your screen saver properties and click the Settings button... you can set it to have the screen go blank (no graphics) and speed it up that way ;)

Mine is running in the system tray (so they call it) 24/7.[nbsp][nbsp]It does seem to go faster when I'm sleeping though :)

Deb

[tedloh]

Mine is on the 24/7 route... but in this case it means if my computer is on, so is SETI, since I turn off the computer when not in use :)

Unfortunately, that means I don't see my screensaver mode very often, so...

Anyhow, more than 80% through - my first unit will be in soon :)

------------------
Ted (Chief Do-It-All)
Tygre Systems Co Ltd
Bangkok, Thailand, Land of Smiles :) :)
http://www.tygresystems.com (work in progress)
ted@tygresystems.com

[Leigh]

I'm finally a site owner and can post to this.[nbsp][nbsp]Been lurking a while though and joined the Seti group before I actually joined FutureQuest!

Anyway, I am "LCI" and no, I didn't have a supercomputer running.[nbsp][nbsp]That first block was apparently a dud.[nbsp][nbsp]They say that if it has too much interference, they just end it short and give you a new one.[nbsp][nbsp]YOu still get the credit though, so that is how it showed at only 40 minutes. :)

Leigh

[Dean B]

Mmmm.. I've just returned from a day out (birthday boy, 38 going on 83 :)) so my SETI screensaver was running all day.[nbsp][nbsp]I was suprised to see that this unit, #3, had been running 10hrs 20 mins and was only 31.2% thru.[nbsp][nbsp]My previous two took a shade under & over 18hrs to complete (PII 333, 192mb RAM and like Deb's running in the system tray) so I'd also have to agree the screensaver graphics must slow things down considerably.

Dean.

[SneakyDave]

I'm leery about using any of the FQ servers for this purpose. Don't they have bandwidth limits also?

[Jacob Stetser]

Well, it's not so much a bandwidth problem- those SETI clients can use about 90% of the CPU's processing time if ou let them. I know. I was going to use a friend's Linux box to do some blocks for me but 'top' showed about 90% CPU usage no matter what settings I used.

There is a "nice" setting to it, which I even tried setting to 19 (something 'man nice' says is the lowest priority) but it still used 90% of the CPU power.

So, especially on a community server serving lots of dynamic (read CPU intensive) content, it's probably not the best idea.

(Then again, I see SIX and NINE are running it.., so I could be wrong... hey, Terra, what's the best setting so as not to use up my friend's resources running SETI?)

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icongarden.com/?fq (http://icongarden.com/?fq)
icongarden: making good ideas grow.

[Deb]

I wouldn't think it to be too great to 'let them run and run' which is why we chose the w/e for six and nine to let them each pump a packet per CPU....[nbsp][nbsp]had it shown any sign of affecting the others on NEO or TAZ then it wouldn't have happened on SIX and NINE.[nbsp][nbsp]But as soon as they finished their set we pulled it... was more of a 'test' thing than anything else (load not time) and figured my as well let you all see how they did...[nbsp][nbsp]NEO will continue but the rest we're haulted hours ago

Deb

[Terra]

Jacob:
Niceness in the Linux kernel is a scheduler function and not related to CPU usage, per sey...

Imagine that you have 50 processes running:
40 running nice 0
5 running nice -5
3 running nice 1
2 running nice 10

When the processes 'wake-up' and need the CPU, then the scheduler looks at the niceness value to decide who gets the CPU first...[nbsp][nbsp]The 'load average' is dependent upon a run queue...

Lets say that 4 processes wake-up:
a -5, 0, 1, 10

These 4 go into the run queue...
-5 gets CPU first
0 next
1 next
10 last

Now with SETI, it will use all available CPU, which is normal for this type of program...

Scheduling dictates that even with this using 90% CPU, that the scheduler will put the process to sleep and allow a higher priority task to run...[nbsp][nbsp]Once the higher priority task has it's CPU time slice (usually 210ms), then it will look at the run queue again and go down the priority/niceness list... If nothing else then SETI will once again dominate...

In other words, with SETI running at low priority (positive numbers == less priority), then the scheduler will put SETI to sleep and run the higher priority task...[nbsp][nbsp]If 2 higher priority tasks wake-up, then the scheduler will run both of them first, then pass the CPU back to SETI...

Hope this makes sense, it's easy to understand but difficult to try and explain unless you actually see the kernel at work...

I ran SIX and NINE with SETI to test processor affinity with dual CPU's...[nbsp][nbsp]It was also a very good test to see the fairness of the SMP scheduler...[nbsp][nbsp]In all instances, SMP allowed both processes to run equally on each CPU...

Processor Affinity == The ability for a process to choose which CPU it wants to run on...[nbsp][nbsp]At this time, Linux does not support this but rather passes the duty to the SMP scheduler to fairly schedule on each processor...[nbsp][nbsp]When I fired off STATS processing the other night, the SMP scheduler gave the analyzer full acess to 1 CPU, while splitting both SETI processes on the other CPU...

Stats analyzer got 95% CPU-1
SETI-1 got 42% of CPU-2
SETI-2 got 42% of CPU-2

The leftover percentages were allocated to the various daemons and CGI leftover to run...

The above was with the *heavy* STATS processing task running...[nbsp][nbsp]

During Normal running throughout the day:
SETI-1 got 97% of CPU-1
SETI-2 got 97% of CPU-2

And in all cases, gracefully stepped out of the way for other processes, especially during Prime Time...[nbsp][nbsp]I watched them remain within 5% of one another, even when Prime Time loads drove them down to 5 - 15% each...

All in all, I was pleased with what I saw and how far Linux's (SMP and non-SMP) scheduler routines had come in the 2.2.x series...[nbsp][nbsp]In 2.0.x series, the SMP scheduler was the pits![nbsp][nbsp]There was no rhyme or reason as to how it chose what to run on which CPU...[nbsp][nbsp]This is why we are so dependent on 2.2.x series with running Dual-CPU servers...

--
Terra
--Phoenix-5 (core) + SETI == One heck of an Acid Test--
FutureQuest

PS: When I had the (Phoenix-5 core) SETI cranked up to -10 (during Prime Time), the servers didn't crash... :D
PSS: The above test was extremely abusive to the server, and drove loads to 15.00 - 20.00, yet the server handled the load gracefully and adjusted appropriately...
PSSS: This is the Phoenix-5 project: HP+Stability... ;)

[This message has been edited by ccTech (edited 08-22-99)]

[Dean B]

An interesting side note to my above post; going about my usual daily doings with SETI running in the bkground.[nbsp][nbsp]I've just looked and seen we've reached the 15hr mark and % has jumped to 66.[nbsp][nbsp]Considering I've been running dreamweaver, photoshop, Eudora[nbsp][nbsp]and been jumping in and out of other stuff all morning I can only conclude that graphic screensaver must really eat up CPU resources.
I now find myslf looking at the blank screensaver waiting for something to happen :)

Dean.

[tedloh]

Mine always seems to hover at 98%.[nbsp][nbsp]Eudora is the biggest resource hog I know - finally figured out to move stuff out of my inbox, outbox, and trash, close all windows, then suddenly Eudora wasn't so bad anymore.

SETI is a resource hog also. Half-tempted to convert to NT so I can use the non-graphical version... LOL
------------------
Ted (Chief Do-It-All)
Tygre Systems Co Ltd
Bangkok, Thailand, Land of Smiles :) :)
http://www.tygresystems.com (work in progress)
ted@tygresystems.com

[Deb]

We did that to mine last night.... I stuck with Win98 but installed the "NT" version instead... it just runs in the DOS Box now ;)

[Dean B]

I too switched to the NT version earlier but somehow gazing at a dos box with scrolling text instead of occasionally peeking at that pretty little red & blue graph being drawn, has for me diminished greatly the air of excitement about the whole thing.[nbsp][nbsp]I may just sacrifice the speed gain for the pretty pictures again.[nbsp][nbsp]Big kid at heart :)

[elite]

I only see one version for all of windows? Am I missing something? Or are you talking about installing it on a Win NT machine? Also how much faster is it?

[Dean B]

Follow the text-only link and grab i386-winnt-cmdline.exe[nbsp][nbsp]I don't know how much faster it is yet.[nbsp][nbsp]I'll let it churn thru a unit and compare results.

Dean.

[Mandi]

Is anybody else having trouble making the program "go" if it's in the background?[nbsp][nbsp]I'm a laptop chickie . . . wondering if that config has something to do with it??[nbsp][nbsp]I certainly can't make it the active window all the time, unfortunnately . . .[nbsp]

[madra]

i'm still trying to find intelligent life on this planet.[nbsp][nbsp]now that's a real challenge!!!
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my dreams one to the other said
this life has let us down
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<font color=#FF0000>www.madra.net</font>
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