Image courtesy of Andreas Kleinke

Eric's SETI@home Adventure

Hey SETI-heads! Eric Sproul here... I just put up this page to chronicle my progress in the SETI@home project. I have been crunching SETI@home work since April 30, 1999, when the project was in beta-test phase. I like the idea of distributed computing, and SETI@home has proven conclusively that great things can be accomplished when many computers are involved!

I'm not a computer-science graduate, but I have worked with computers as a personal hobby for about 15 years.

Here are some stats on my machines...
At work:

And at home:

Milestones

1/26/2000: Passed 1000 work units.
2/2/2000: Passed the 99.5% mark in the user ranking.
2/7/2000: All my clients updated to 2.0.
3/8/2000: Passed 2 years of computing time! (1249 WU's)
3/29/2000: Moved page to my new personal site at www.ericsproul.to
4/11/2000: Discovered that at some point, during a reboot, the 233 reverted to running at only 133 MHz! Yowza, only 57% of its capability! Had to reboot and adjust the BIOS setting. Been running great since. Work unit average times are dropping again. :)
4/21/2000: Upgraded Windows machine to 2.4-winnt-cmdline.
4/22/2000: Upgraded Linux machines to 2.4 as well.
4/26/2000: Added P-III 600 at home, 350 is offline until it becomes a Unix box. (Either FreeBSD or Linux, not sure yet)
5/3/2000: P-II 350 became another Linux box, and is back online.
6/19/2000: Passed 2000 work units; passed 99.6% ranking.
9/10/2000: Work machine updated from a P2-300 to a P3-550, OC'ed to 616.
9/20/2000: Got bored, converted the 350 from Linux to FreeBSD.
10/1/2000: Got bored again, built the AMD with FreeBSD.
10/9/2000: Updated Linux machines to 3.0 client.
10/12/2000: Updated Windows box to 3.0 client.
11/12/2000: Passed 3000 work units; 99.639% ranking.
11/25/2000: Hit 4 years of computing time (3133 WU's).
12/8/2000: Upgraded the 233 to 300 MHz PII. Whoopdeedoo, right? Hey, every little bit helps!!
12/12/2000: The 600 at home is now a dual-boot Win98/Redhat-7.0 machine.
1/2/2001: Upgraded work machines to client 3.03.
1/10/2001: Upgraded P-III workstation to Redhat 7.0.
1/17/2001: Home 350 upgraded to 3.03 client, 600 winnt client upgraded as well.
2/3/2001: AMD 233 upgraded to 4.2-RELEASE and 3.03 client.
2/21/2001: AMD 700 added as the new webserver for ericsproul.to.
3/23/2001: Passed the 99.7% mark in user ranking; 3967 work units.
3/27/2001: Passed 5 years of CPU time; 3998 work units.
3/28/2001: Passed 4000 work units; 99.701% ranking.
4/30/2001: Today is my 2nd anniversary of being a SETI cruncher!
Current stats are 4200 units, 5.3 years of CPU time, and 11 hrs, 3 min. avg. time/unit.
5/10/2001: The AMD 700 needs to just be a webserver; stopped using it for SETI. :-(
8/6/2001: Passed 6 years CPU time (4692 WU's, 99.725% rank). Also a bunch of updates to the machine list since I've moved/reconfigured some boxes.
8/27/2001: My first non-Intel based CPU added... it's my new white iBook G3! She's quite a sight...
10/2/2001: Passed 5000 work units! Quite a milestone... 6.4 years of CPU, 11 hrs. 13 mins. average per unit, 99.729% ranking.
10/27/2001: The PII/300 OpenBSD box became a Linux fileserver.
11/6/2001: The AMD 700 came home a while back and the webserver got a new board with a Duron 750. It is now running s@h to bring my total number of machines to 7.
1/7/2002: Passed 7 years of computing time recently. Currently I'm at 7.3 years CPU, with 5712 WU's and 99.747% in the ranking.
2/23/2002: Picked up an 8th machine, the P3-500. Thanks Dirk!
2/28/2002: Passed 6000 work units. 7.77 years CPU time, 11:20:59 avg. time, 99.748% ranking.
4/1/2002: Added a new home machine-- my first "duallie"; though it is only a dual-266. Still pretty cool though, because I get 2 WU's out of this box at a time. Also trying out Lycoris (formerly Redmond Linux) Desktop/LX distribution. It's a fun, desktop-oriented distro that will make a good addition to my collection.
4/22/2002: So much for best-laid plans... the duallie had to be redeployed as a replacement web server, as I'm losing my colocated server soon. I'm not sure how it's going to perform as a web server so I'm holding off running S@H on it for the time being.
4/25/2002: The new webserver is snoozing, so on with SETI installation!
4/30/2002: 3 years! Just hit my 3rd anniversary of being a SETI dork. Yay for me. ;-)
6/10/2002: Added an old PentiumPro machine that's sitting in my office. This brings to 10 the total number of machines I have running S@H all or part of the time.
6/12/2002: Started noticing some SCSI problems in the PIII-616 (my overclocked office machine) so I backed off the overclocking to the stock 550 MHz setting. Shouldn't make too much difference.
7/1/2002: Last week I upgraded my office workstation to Redhat 7.3 and set up the Duron 750 at home to try out Openwall GNU/Linux. Also converted the iBook's client from the GUI version to the command-line. It's running noticeably faster, as expected.
7/25/2002: 7000 work units reached; 9.275 years CPU, 11:36 avg WU time, 99.753% ranking.
10/1/2002: 10 years of CPU time reached; 7530 work units, 99.753% ranking.
11/5/2002: Made some updates to the hardware list.
12/6/2002: 8000 work units reached; 10.6 years CPU, 99.748% ranking.
1/4/2003: 11 years of CPU time reached; 8259 WU, 99.747% ranking.
2/14/2003: 100,000 hours of CPU time! That's 11.408 years.
4/30/2003: 4 years of participation and 9000 work units reached on the same day! 99.736% ranking, 11.938 years CPU time.
5/9/2003: 12 years of CPU time reached.
7/29/2003: The list of machines was way out of date, so I updated it.
8/25/2003: Replaced the PIII-600 at home with a new, speedy Athlon box. This new guy crunches a work unit in 2-3 hours, vs. 10-11 for the others. Should help the stats!
9/18/2003: 13 years of CPU time reached; 9979 WU, 99.718% ranking.
9/21/2003: 10,000 work units!
12/1/2003: 11,000 work units; 13.74 yrs CPU; 99.732% ranking.
2/11/2004: 12,000 work units; 14.54 yrs CPU; 99.742% ranking.
3/30/2004: 15 years CPU time; 12588 WU, 99.745% ranking.
4/30/2004: 5 years of S@H participation; 12964 WU, 15.25 yrs. CPU, 99.746% rank.
5/6/2004: 13,000 work units; 15.28 yrs CPU; 99.745% ranking.
8/4/2004: 14,000 work units.
10/13/2004: 15,000 work units; 16.64 yrs CPU; 99.757% ranking.
12/16/2004: 16,000 work units; 17.24 yrs CPU; 99.767% ranking.
2/21/2005: 17,000 work units; 17.78 yrs CPU; 99.773% ranking.
4/28/2005: 6 years of participation; 17825 WU, 18.27 yrs. CPU, 99.778% rank.
5/18/2005: 18,000 work units; 18.37 yrs CPU; 99.778% ranking.
I have decided to stop here at this nice round number. The original SETI@home project is winding down, and I'd rather save some electricity after 6 years of solid SETI crunching.

Between Milestones

I've done some rough figuring and come up with a table of the time it took to reach each 1k-unit milestone:
----
     0-1000: 271 days (4-30-1999 thru 1-26-2000)
  1000-2000: 145 days (1-26-2000 thru 6-19-2000)
  2000-3000: 146 days (6-19-2000 thru 11-12-2000)
  3000-4000: 136 days (11-12-2000 thru 3-28-2001)
  4000-5000: 187 days (3-28-2001 thru 10-2-2001)
  5000-6000: 149 days (10-2-2001 thru 2-28-2002)
  6000-7000: 147 days (2-28-2002 thru 7-25-2002)
  7000-8000: 134 days (7-25-2002 thru 12-6-2002)
  8000-9000: 145 days (12-6-2002 thru 4-30-2003)
 9000-10000: 144 days (4-30-2003 thru 9-21-2003)
10000-11000:  71 days (9-21-2003 thru 12-1-2003)
11000-12000:  72 days (12-1-2003 thru 2-11-2004)
12000-13000:  85 days (2-11-2004 thru 5-6-2004)
13000-14000:  90 days (5-6-2004 thru 8-4-2004)
14000-15000:  70 days (8-4-2004 thru 10-13-2004)
15000-16000:  64 days (10-13-2004 thru 12-16-2004)
16000-17000:  67 days (12-16-2004 thru 2-21-2005)
17000-18000:  86 days (2-21-2005 thru 5-18-2005)
----
The first 1000 took a while because I only had a couple of computers. Even though I kept adding machines, once the client reached v.3 the computation became more intensive, so that's why the number of days for each subsequent "Kunits" levels off. I'm not sure why 4k-5k took so much longer.

The Athlon XP 2500+ and Duron 1300 made a big difference, cutting the 1K unit time in half.

Links

SETI@home Official Site: Check here to find out more about the SETI@home program, and to download a client so you can participate.
Science updates from the official site.
Team Xenno
Updated 18 May 2005
Mail me with comments, questions, snide remarks, etc.

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esproul@abuse.ntelos.net