SETI@Home Boinc Upgrade
My Seti Classic statistics show that I have completed 9,066 work units. I am comming very close to achieving the 10,000 work unit milestone. I have a few boxes that have worked long and hard on this. I am starting to fear that it is all for nothing.
I decided to give in and start looking at this “BOINC” client that the SETI@Home website has been advertising. BOINC is an accronym for Berkely Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. I logged in and found that I only have 6,209 SETI Classic work units credited to my account as of March 15, 2005. Ouch! I was under the impression that they wouldn’t move the work units over until I actually created a BOINC account.
Well, I just spent some time removing all the sofware and services running on each computer such as the Seti@Home Service and Seti Queue. I also went ahead and saved a map of the locations of each work unit that I processed from the Seti Queue web interface. I think it only remembers the last 500 units.
I setup BOINC on each machine. One of the machines is running Windows 98 and will not run BOINC as a background service. I have to be logged in in order for it to work. The other machine has Mac OS X 10.2.8, but the BOINC client requires Mac OS X 10.3 or higher. I would like to upgrade to Mac OS X 10.4, but I don’t have enough memory for it. Such a head ache.
On top of this, I am also finding out that there service is having problems this past week and will not come back online until after this weekend. It looks like I picked the wrong time to upgrade.
Anyway, here is a link to my new SETI@Home profile. I’m glad they switched to a white background. It is hard on the eyes to read a dark web page with bright text.
Tags: SETI, BOINC, SETI@Home, Science, Aliens, Super Computers, Distributed Computing