SETI 10th Anniversary Gauntlet Race

[QuietIce]

SETI at Netherlands (S@NL) is hosting a SETI race this year in honor of their 10th Anniversary of crunching. (SETI@Home celebrated it's 10th Anniversary in May). After taking a look at some of the other teams, well, they've got some heavy hitters joining in and we'd like the help of any Folders willing to dedicate a rig or two toward crunching for about a month.

S@NL is trying to balance the teams a little this year so you'd have to start crunching sometime on the 18-19th of September so we can gauge the RAC of our team before the start of the race. We may have to split into two teams in the end but nobody will know this until race start and it will depend not only on our crunching power but the other teams as well. The race itself will run from Thursday, 24 September through 15 October.

Non-SETI folders will need to download and install BOINC* from SETI@Home then sign up for SETI@Home during installation. Instructions on joining the Overclockers.com Team will follow soon. (Returning members might want to update their BOINC installation as well.) Once you've done this, or if you're already a SETI member and still have your password, then all you need to do is sign up for the Gauntlet in this thread. I need your SETI username to get you signed up so please be sure to include it in your post even if it's the same as your OCF username.

BOINC is a very easy program to install and maintenance is almost nil once you complete the set-up. Even optimizer installation has gotten much easier since someone at Lunatics has come up with a unified installer. I know anyone with past SETI optimizer experience will cheer this news! (SETI/BOINC code from SETI@Home is written far all rigs, even ancient ones. Optimizers take advantage of SSE in all it's forms and increases yield.)


We look forward to any help Team 32 members can give us in our quest for World SETI Domination and I'm sure we'll have a great Gauntlet Race this year!
Thanks for reading ...




*BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) is an interface framework for many projects including SETI@Home, Rosetta (similar to F@H), Climate Prediction, Einstein (gravity physics), and dozens of other scientific projects from all over the world.

 

[QuietIce]

Other SETI information

Signing up for the Overclockers.com SETI Team
The Overclockers.com SETI Team is the real world (not Gauntlet) team where all OCForums SETI points are accumulated. Currently we are 8th in the World and are very small compared to the teams still ahead of us. By being a part of the Overclockers.com Team all your SETI points (called CobbleStones) are added to the team total. Becoming a member of the team is fairly easy. Open BOINC in "Advanced" view (default is basic view) to show all the options and short-cut buttons available. In the Projects tab, make sure SETI@Home is high-lighted then click the "Your Account" button on the left to open your account screen at Berkeley. In the upper right-hand corner you should see an option to join a team. Click this and join "Overclockers.com". That's it!
((I may have to alter those instructions a little - it's been awhile since I've run this on a new rig.))


Setting Preferences in BOINC
With BOINC open in advanced view select "Advanced/Preferences" from the drop-down menus. From here you can select options for suspending BOINC during computer usage, percent of processor time to use, disk and memory usage, and network usage. BOINC runs all units at low priority so any other tasks you're doing will take precedence over BOINC (though it may slightly slow processor intense tasks). In general the default settings are fine for most people but there are a couple of things to change under the "network usage" tab. Make sure the "connect about every" value is 0.5 days and the "additional work buffer" is set to 10 days. Berkeley does it's best to keep up but there are times they have extended down-time so setting a high work buffer will insure work is available even if Berkeley isn't handing any out.

Toward the end of the race (if you're not hooked on SETI by then! ) you can go to the "Projects" tab, highlight SETI@home, then click the "No new tasks" button on the left. This will stop BOINC from down-loading any new tasks. As a note to this, 10 days of tasks in your buffer will only last about 7 days if you're using optimizers (and even less for newer CPUs) so please don't click this until we're into the last week of the race.


Opitimizing SETI@Home
SETI at home apps released by Berkeley are written for all platforms and don't take advantage of any SSE languange your processor may have. Several SETI members have written programs, called "optimizers", over the years to close this gap by writing SETI apps that do take advantage of SSE and other tricks for specific processors/systems. If you're running Windows the optimizer installation process is fairly simple using the Lunitics Unified Installer. The Installer can be found here and all you need do is unzip and run the installer for your OS.
Lunitic's Windows Unified Installer Page

If you're running Linux things are a little more complicated. Here is the Linux page on Lunitics.
Lunitic's Linux SETI Apps Page


Work units and credit
SETI@Home processes all work units (WUs) on two machines at once and allows a fairly big space of time for completion. Both results from a WU must match in order for either result to be "validated". Once a WU is validated you get credit for the WU - but not before then. There's about a 40% chance that you will complete a WU that has already been turned in. Assuming your rig and your "wingman" (the other guy running the WU) got the same results you'll get credit when you turn in these WUs. The other ~60% of your WUs will be "pending", waiting for your wingman to complete. When his result is turned in, and if it matches yours, you will get credit for the WU at that time (the WU will be moved from "pending" to "validated"). Eventually the WUs moving from pending to validated in a day will balance with the WUs you turn in that aren't getting credit that day. It takes about 7 days to balance out, sometimes more for newer CPUs, so don't fret if your rig doesn't seem to be crunching as much as you think it should. You can always check your WU times by clicking the "Your results" button on the left in BOINC.


CUDA
If you happen to have nVidia graphics cards (8xxx or newer only) SETI does support CUDA. I don't have newer cards so if any problems crop up I'll ask someone with more experience to answer questions.


Don't hesitate to ask questions - my philosophy is,
"The only stupid question is the one you don't ask!" ...

 

[drshivas]

I'm in!

and bump for our SETI bros

 

[drshivas]

Friendly bump for the SETI folks. Cuttoff to sign up for their race is tomorrow, the 18th.

 

[QuietIce]

Sign-up has now ended for the 2009 Gauntlet.

For all those Folders that signed up ...


Thanks from

...!!!