[Coco] Re: off-topic, space program

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 15 January 2004 03:12, Roger Taylor wrote:
>At 03:03 AM 1/15/2004 -0500, you wrote:
>>Hey, congrates Theodore.  I passed the 5000 unit mile marker last
>>fall, and was at one time in 99.27% ranking, but when I shut them
>>down while I was in Colorado for 2 months, I lost some ground I'll
>>never gain back without throwing some more hor$epower at it. 
>> Faster machines than this one are and have been working at the
>> 25-35 units a day range for a fair amount of time now.  So I'm
>> someplace in the 37,000th place out of over 4 million.
>>
>>In case anyone is interested, a fellow West Virginian is in the top
>>20!  Luke Mester, has something to do with the Brooke County
>> Schools, and has the whole town plus a couple of racks of bare
>> motherboards all working on seti.  One of his "Hillbilly Super
>> Computers" is a square frame made of 2x2's, with 11 motherboards
>> mounted in it.  Old slow baords, but when you add them up, he has
>> crunched 695,571 units as of tonight.  We're just wannabees. :)
>
>What is their definition of unit, and how exactly does your computer
>participate in this spreading out of chores?
>
A "unit" is about 340k worth of noise, recorded near the waterhole at 
1420 mhz, as the earth turns and steers the aricebo dish east to 
west.  That dish is also steerable north and south by quite a few 
degrees by moving the feedhorn house north and south on its 
suspension cables.  So it can cover about half the northern 
hemisphere of the universe.

The program that runs on our computers is doing a "butterfly 
transform", equ to an FFT, at various center frequencies in small 
fractions of a hertz around the waterhole, looking to see if there is 
anything non-random in that noise, which might make it something to 
go back and look at again to see if that particular star system is 
still doing its version of an I Love Lucy rerun.  So far, everything 
has been a false, non-repeatable alarm.  Or so they say.  I'd attach 
a snapshot of my ksetispy results screen, but it just started on a 
fresh unit a few minutes ago, so there are no real results yet.
Its doing about 214 megaflops a second ATM, in between my keystrokes.  
That will slow some as the bandwidth its working at gets narrower.

The cpu meter? Stuck at 100% now since 1998 as I start the seti client 
in my rc.local script so its running even before I log in, so this 
elderly Thoroughbred core is typically running in the high 60C area.

>----------
>Roger Taylor

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap,
ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.22% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
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by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2004 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.