[brooksgraham]

I've just recently (today!) stumbled across the whole boinc thing when I noticed that my sah text client had troubles contacting their server - yet again.

Anyhoo, after nosing around a bit on the boinc site and various project sites, I'm curious as to why we feel the need for special "optimized" versions of the client.

It appears that the client is just a wrapper for the real code which gets downloaded from the project site - and it seems that the projects don't release their source so I can't tell if they've used code which uses the Velocity Engine / Altivec / VMX (btw, does anyone know which, if any, projects do?).

Other than the reported loss of stability, what does the "optimized" client get me?

Just curious.

-brooks

[mikkyo]

The optimized clients are faster.
Faster means you get more crunching done.
The workers do all the work, so yes, having them optimized is more ideal as they will get even more done.
There was a worker for Seti that used altivec, but it has had recent issues, as far as I know.
Einstein@home may now use altivec in the worker as well.

If you search and look around through the Boinc posts you can learn more than you ever wanted about boinc, and seti and programming.

See the Boinc Benchmarks thread for more info:
Especially this post:
http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...09#post2090509
And the last few
http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...53#post2350553