Seti

[BOF]

Not that it's a really big deal, but is it possible to - how can I put this delicately? - 'manipulate' results in order to move up the list more quickly? Quite why anyone would want to do this is beyond me, but I have suspicions!

I see there was earlier discussion on this - http://www.aota.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1601&highlight=SETI

As I said, I'm not particularly fussed - more curious. %)

Chris

[BOF]

Well, looks like I'm alone here. I suppose no one else is bothered either!

[sheila]

I guess it is possible. But I'm not going to worry about it. I'd like to know why it now takes me 300-400 hours to complete a single packet. But at least it isn't slowing my computer down any more, so I run it. What the heck.

But as far as "cheating" at SETI...those people are really sad. I feel sorry for them.

[Jeff]

People cheat at everything else: money, taxes, hours, markups, cards, monopoly, golf... so I'm not surprised at all.

I did notice that one of the top 100 users (of the SAH project as a whole) a couple weeks ago had an average WU time of less than three minutes, which is a bit suspect unless NASA has quite the CPU running SETI now.

But to keep it in perspective, even if a few people are returning bogus results, the fact that work units are being processed 3 or more times each makes it extremely unlikely that the same cheater would get the same WU all times it is handed out, and thus the data checking will throw out any bad results which don't match the properly processed ones. They have to have this redundancy in case a legitimate user happened to have a "bad machine" which caused an error anyway, so I think they view cheaters as more of an annoyance than a huge problem to the project. Of course, understandably they don't say much about the issue, so I'm just guessing.

[Jeff]

I'd like to know why it now takes me 300-400 hours to complete a single packet. But at least it isn't slowing my computer down any more

Wow! What CPU are you running? This is with the SETI GUI screen saver drawing pretty pictures, or with SETI set to go to black after 1 or 0 minutes? The CLI version was the one slowing down your computer? I have noticed that when running 2 CLI versions, I somtimes have to shut them down to get a print dialogue to show up without an extended wait, but that's about the extent of my suffering. (I hate to shut SETi down because I most often forget to start it up again until the next reboot)

My Current Seti Machines:
AMD K62 350 - 40 hours / 1 WU (now offline)
Dual PPro 200, NT - 36 hours / 2 WU's (upgraded)
Dual PII 333 Overdrive, NT - 25 hours / 2 WU's
Dual PII 450, PC100, NT - 13 hours / 2 WU's
Single PIII 1Ghz, PC133, 2000 - 6.35 hours / 1 WU (temporary)
Dual PIII 1Ghz, PC800 RDRAM, 2000 - 7.25 hours / 2 WU's

[sheila]

Originally posted by Jeff:


Wow! What CPU are you running? This is with the SETI GUI screen saver drawing pretty pictures, or with SETI set to go to black after 1 or 0 minutes? The CLI version was the one slowing down your computer? I have noticed that when running 2 CLI versions, I somtimes have to shut them down to get a print dialogue to show up without an extended wait, but that's about the extent of my suffering. (I hate to shut SETi down because I most often forget to start it up again until the next reboot)

I'm running a Pentium II, somewhere in the 250-400 MgHz range (don't remember right now, exactly).

It used to finish in 27-33 hours. Then, I did some funky stuff to the machine, and it really started slowing my stuff down (messed around with the screen saver settings). Finally fixed that back, but now it takes upwards of 300 hours to do a packet. Might be because I'm running a mail server on the same machine. I don't know.

I've dot the screen saver version running. It's set to go black after 10 minutes (power saver mode). Could this be the problem? I used to run it "always on", but recently turned that off, as it was slowing my machine down, too much. But, for example, at night when I'm asleep (i.e. not using the computer) it only gets 5% of a packet done, if that much. Used to get a good 1/3 or more done. I wish I knew what settings I messed up so I could get it back to a 30 hour completion per packet.

Jeff, if you have any advice, I'd love to hear it. I've mentioned this a few times before in the forums, but I guess other people had no idea what the problem was, because no one ever commented on it until you did, just now.

[ryount]

It almost sounds like the whole system is going into power save mode rather than just the monitor. Check the power management settings in control panel and make sure the system isn't set to go into standby mode.

[sheila]

Originally posted by ryount:
It almost sounds like the whole system is going into power save mode rather than just the monitor. Check the power management settings in control panel and make sure the system isn't set to go into standby mode.
That sounded like a good guess, but I check and I see:
Power Schemes: Always On
System Standby: Never
Turn Off Monitor: After 10 minues
Turn off hard disks: Never

I think I checked this out before, and made sure to set StandBy to "Never" (on account of SETI).

When the current packet finishes, I think I will install the CLI. I tried looking for it before, months ago, but the setiathome site doesn't make it easy to find the CLI for Windows users. But I looked yesterday, and located it. Maybe that would help?

I'm gonna miss the pretty graphs, though.

[Jeff]

I haven't run the SETI GUI client in ages, and don't run Windows 9x either, but I would hazard to guess that you're right and somehow powering down the monitor is stopping the actual WU processing by the screen saver. I know that I read that in Windows 9x, unlike in Windows NT or 2000, the CPU time reported isn't really CPU time, but rather is somehow based on the system clock. Someone reset their date and time and found that the change they made was added to SETI's reported WU CPU time. So I would hazard to guess that your GUI client is only actually processing until the screen is powered down by windows.

A really handy companion for the Windows CLI version is SetiDriver:
http://www.wakeassoc.com/setidriver/

If you have more than one computer networked, SetiQueue is also a great addition. I use Setidriver to run the CLI, and proxy it though SetiQueue and it works great. http://www.reneris.com/seti/

[SumBodyElze]

Interesting to see how other people's machines are doing with SETI WUs...

My old Macintosh G3 used to take about 20 hours to process one WU.

When I got my PowerMac G4, that dropped down to about 7 hours. Then SETI changed the algorithms to do more expanded processing and my WUs are now taking about 10-12 hours each...