[C-Eye]

Howdy,

I just got a new Dual 500 G4 in at work last week and added SETi@home. The client may not be multi-processor aware, but this baby cranks out units in just over 5 hours each!

That's 3 times faster than my 266Mhz iMac that's been running SETI@home since May of '99.

Look for my stats to increase dramatically in the coming months, I'm leaving the G4 on 24/7 to spit out the units while I'm away - which isn't much (I'm having a hard time dragging myself away from work now that I have this beast of a comp)

BTW I just changed my SETI@home user name. Was 'Craig Isley' - now 'C-Eye'

Glad I can help Team MacNN crush those PC weenies!

I have a couple of G4 500 boxes and a Dual 500 as well.... All are doing units in five hours, give or take 30 min. The dual is NO faster than the single.....

Moof

[wlonh]

ba da BOOM, cool... glad you like your new Mac... and glad to have you on our team!

btw, my beige rev2 G3 minitower (currently@466MHz) cranks out WU's at approx 5.75 hours on average, i love this old Mac and will be upping it to a G4 soon, the third time it has been upgraded... this is undoubtedly one of the best boxes Apple ever made... NewWorldROM is still problematic and is at the bottom of most issues that are being commonly experienced by users with the newer Macs that employ NewWorldROM, problems i never see with my trusty beige (Macs since the iMac was intro'd have NewWorldROM) and i hope that OS X will fix these issues and so much more... of course OS X will usher in its own new problems too... this is the game that moves as you play...

such is life, onward through the fog and damn the torpedoes

[This message has been edited by wlonh (edited 08-20-2000).]

Just joined seti and the team the past weekend. I'm hoping to bump past #150 sometime soon. I've got a Dual 450, Cube and a G4/400 and they all seem pretty comperable processing units between 7 and 8 hours. Looking at processing time it seems Seti is using both processors but we don't seem to get through a unit any faster.

Regardless, with 7-9 units a day I'm pushing to be in the top 100 within a couple weeks.

Eric

[wlonh]

good of you to join us, Macintosh Guy, i remember your MacTips webpage... or have a slipped a cog and am thinking of someone else? no, i think not... glad to have your illustrious company here!

anyway, your times are a bit slow for those Macs, i'd be glad to help you out with info on how to speed up your crunch time per WU

i have just emailed you...

[Misha]

Your G4s should be able to bust out units in under 6 hours... are you using LibMoto, or RAM Disk? I assume screensaver mode, going blank after a minute?

Yeah, it's me. and I broke #150 today! Nice to be recognized. Very cool Dr. Bott is now "illustrious".

OK, here's the funny part, we have another few iMacs and a PC that we could add to the race but I didn't want to kill the average times.

I'll start a new thread about performance stuff.

I just discovered Team MacNN and thought it would be a good place to contribute my units. I have 650, mostly done on a G4 500 purchased last February. It does a unit in about 6 hours. My average time is listed as slower than that because my first 100 or so units were done on a Power Computing Power Tower Pro 250, which completed a unit in around 24 hrs.

------------------
"I am going to drag you, kicking
and screaming if I have to, into the
modern world!"
--Peter the Great

[wlonh]

hi Michael, thanks and welcome to the team...

All you MP guys will be glad to here that they are currently writing the MP version of SETI. That should bring your time per unit down to 3 hrs. Cool huh?

Where did you see that a MP version is in development?

Moof

[C-Eye]

Makes sense to me. Why not max out all apps written for the Mac to take advantage of Apple's new standard for their high-end systems? Perhaps we'll se a MP aware version of SEtI by the time OS X rolls around in 2001.

[wlonh]

don't hold your breath... likely there will be NO Altivec-enhanced nor MP-enhanced SETI client...

see the last post in this thread:
http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/Foru...ML/000059.html

which states, in part:

"After emailing the head programmer of the Seti project, I got a reply along the lines of "We will not and cannot optimize Seti@home for Altivec because it's too platform specific. Doing so will mean that we will also have to optimize the client for AMD, Intel, and other specific platforms, and we do not have enough resources to do so."

extrapolating the logic of the developer's remarks, it follows that there will be no MP version as Macs are the only platform which employ MP tech.

this is speculation as regards the future availability of an MP version of SETI for Mac...

the ONLY intelligent thing to do if you are truly concerned as regards the possibility of an MP client for Mac is to email the SETI project and ask them... get your info from the horse's mouth and end the ineffectual speculation by getting the facts...

davea@ssl.berkeley.edu Project Director. David has done extensive research in operating systems, distributed computing, and computer graphics. He designed the SETI@home client, server, and web-site software and data architecture.

danw@ssl.berkeley.edu Chief Scientist. Dan has been involved in SETI observations for 20 years. He has published over 35 papers and books on SETI, and leads the SERENDIP Project at UC Berkeley. He designed the SETI@home analysis algorithms and data collection hardware.

also see: http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/mattl

[This message has been edited by wlonh (edited 09-02-2000).]

wlonh I took your advice and contacted David Anderson. He was polite enough to reply and inform me that an MP version will be out soon. I made another reply to ask about Alti-Vec enhancements but have not heard from him yet.

[someone]

Hi everybody!
My AGP G4/450 seems to be having problems. Recently, it was churning out a work unit in about 8 hours. Now, after summer vacation, its taking, on average, 11 HOURS per unit!! Help! I've performed all the speed enhancing tips (Ram Disk, blank mode, quitting the Finder, etc), and still no luck. Any ideas? Suggestions?


P.S:

anyway, your times are a bit slow for those Macs, i'd be glad to help you out with info on how to speed up your crunch time per WU

i have just emailed you...

wlonh, could you e-mail me too?


[This message has been edited by someone (edited 09-03-2000).]

[wlonh]

can't email you, you have no addy listed...

[someone]

Thanks for the tips, wlonh! BTW, I got LibMoto back in '96, when it was (to me) a pretty nifty well-hidden thing. I think it might actually be slowing my G4 down! The math routines are four years old, after all. Wouldn't Apple's own routines have caught up by now?

[This message has been edited by someone (edited 09-04-2000).]

[wlonh]

yeah perhaps LibMotoSh is a bit outdated, i use it on my dear old (ha) beige G3 minitower (466 MHz/1M L2) and it perks it up a bit, just a bit... many say that they see no improvement with LibMotoSh, and many do see an improvement... whatever



and a few say it is the work of Satan and it crashes their Mac(s), this i have no belief in, none at all.

[brock76]

The main advantage will show when MacOS X comes out. I'll be able to run two Seti Clients on my Dual G4. Just have to use the BSD terminal window to allocate a Seti Client to each processor. For now, a dual is just the same as a single but It'll pay ya back in the long run.

brock

[someone]

Isn't that called symmetric multiprocessing? Sounds cool.