The SETI@home project
"SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data." Quoted directly from the SETI@home website.
What sounds very dry soon became my dearest CPU power consumer. I started running units in October '99 and went on until August 2000. I reached 470 units and then started to look for something different. Check my homepage to see what I found!
In case you don't know what I'm talking about, or need more information on the subject, or wish to join the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (not to mention the probability of finding small, brown, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri), check out
There you'll find everything you ever wanted to know (and more) about the topic.
Useful utilities (as an addition to the Seti program) I came to like are:
SetiSpy: A small programm giving you all the information and statistics you can handle.SetiQueue: A queueing application that downloads a bundle of workunits and caches them for later use. Good for computers not permanently connected to the internet or for people paying a per minute fee.Hints for better SETI performance
Here you'll find some of the stuff I came to learn through different sources about how you're able to perform more work. They worked for me, hope they'll do for you too!
If you're running the screensaver version of SETI set it to blank after 0 minutes, generating the graphics costs about 60% of your system's power.Download the CLC. No graphics, but it is approximately 10% faster and available for a huge variety of systems. The Windows NT version runs on Win9x too, except in case you have a very old Winsock version. But you can update that.If you have an AMD or Cyrix processor, running the version of the CLC optimized for non-Intel processors improves the times a bit.Use SetiQueue, so there'll never be a problem with downloading new workunits again even when the SETI server is down.Running SETI@home under Linux is faster than under Windows (well, not a real surprise).Surprising though: Win9x is faster than NT/2000.In your system's BIOS settings, disable Video/BIOS caching (sometimes called shadowing). Leaves more valuable RAM and cache for SETI and won't harm system performance.If you know a bit about your system, overclock it. Why? More speed, better performance, no cost. A good resource for information on overclocking is Ars Technica.If you use an Athlon mainboard with a 751 chipset try ChipID (11kb) and enable "superbypass-mode" to increase your system speed by approx. 5%.If you use a VIA chipset, download the latest [broken link] 4-in-1 driver, it increased my average by about 3%.RAM. A lot is good, more is even better. Consider that the SETI@home application takes up about 16MB.If you consider buying a new system, have a look on the size of the L2 cache. 1MB would be great since SETI@home is very heavy on the memory.
