[wlonh]

sine, you always go off on some tangent...



WE HAVE A TEAM MACNN already!! yo!!

JOIN HERE: TEAM MacNN for SETI

and this is the SETI page for Team MacNN:
HERE
not to be confused with the UPCOMING MacNN webpage for Team MacNN... stay tuned, it's coming soon!

[This message has been edited by wlonh (edited 03-20-2000).]

[wlonh]

hey! Team MacNN is growing, we now have 31 members!

Team MacNN, "The single most amazing group of Mac users ever assembled for anything. Ever."
Members results to date:

Results received
3327
Total CPU time
5.62 years

not bad... for a new team!

There's some FREEWARE for monitoring YOUR SETI stats as well as other team member's stats called SETI Checker, "Application to check the current statistics of a SETI@Home team without having to lauch a web-browser" and much more, download it HERE

and there's SETI Unit Manager, free as well: "an AppleScript which was written to get the maximum out of SETI@home. It offers full automated down-/uploads, offline crunching and RAM Disk handling." download HERE

[slboett]

wlonh

Are you and I the only ones that respond to our own threads???

Scott

[zac4mac]

Kudos wlonh, you've put together a strong team...took us a while to break 3000 units and y'all are there...keep crankin those WU's... tear 'em up Scott

[tadd]

I've been watching the trends here. I'm having some fun with the competition. We are adding new members to the team very quickly. The membership growth is changing the number of work units that the team HAS much faster than the actual processing by members. I wanted to know how many work units the team is actually processing. Since I wanted to be the highest work unit processor (haha) I also wanted to know if any of the people lower on the list were actually cranking out more work units than I and by how much. Well. I was surprised. (chris!!)

I added up, as best as I could, the number of work units that members of team MacNN did either over the last week, or (if they haven't been members for a full week), since they joined, and came up with a total of 289 work units for team MacNN over the past week. The number is actually slightly higher than that because of people joining between my data taking. The high work unit doers are, in decreasing order,
chris with 92,
tadd with 38,
Thomas Richard with 27,
siboett with 19,
Dave McSherry with 15,
the-member-with-no-name, 14,
Tony Butcher with 12,
nycdewd with 10,
John L Becker 9,
jeffreyloaf 8
ironknee, kaiser_soce 6
Buckaroo Banzai-1 5

I could have made math or copying errors and the granularity of my data taking is about 2 days.
I suspect that next week's results are going to be MUCH higher since we've nearly doubled in membership (33 from 17) since a week ago. I don't have a trivial way to keep track of this data so if we double again by next week that may be the last time I am able to perform this by hand. I will try to do this again in a couple of days.

------------------
Tadd Torborg

[wlonh]

hey folks there is a new version of SETI Unit Manager (free) available here: http://212.86.34.76/SUM/Readme.html

"SETI UNiT Manager (SUM) is an AppleScript which was written to get the maximum out of SETI@home. It offers full automated down-/uploads, offline crunching, RAM Disk handling and detailed Statistics about your productivity."

[tadd]

As of March 26th, we have 37 members our team's output was 360 units per week over the past week.
The highest work unit generating team members over the past week (or less if they are new members) are:
chris with 93
siboet and tadd each with 33
Thomas Richard with 27
ironknee with 20
the member with no name with 17
Dave McSherry with 16
Tony Butcher with 15
kate with 14
Buckaroo Banzai-1 with 13
nycdewd and kaiser_soce with 9
John L. Becker with 8
Houston with 7
blake with 6
tpw, jeffreyloaf/G3-350 and Stu each with 5

I could have made math or copying errors and the granularity of my data taking is about 2 days.
I don't have a trivial way to keep track of this data so as the number of members increase it becomes more difficult to do by hand. I will try to do this again in a couple of days.

------------------
Tadd Torborg

[wlonh]

Tadd, that's great... you have gone to some trouble to do this, thanks...

but there is a freeware item that i believe i have mentioned a few times, SETI Checker... it shows a complete listing of the members of Team MacNN and their performance to-date.

in the SETI Checker window there are several tabs, much like the Internet control panel for example.

one of these tabs is labeled "Teams", click on this and enter your personal teamname and 'Team MacNN' into the team fields and select 'clubs' from the dropmenu and click the 'Connect' button to retrieve info on Team MacNN and your own personal stats in some detail.

SETI Checker does require an internet connection, but it is better than, say, launching your browser or even hitting the SETI@home stats webpage because sometimes the SETI site is SLOOOOOOOW loading... SETI Checker is very very stable, never heard of any issues with it and i have had none with it.

SETI Checker homepage

[tadd]

wlonh,
I'm trying to get seti checker to do both do what it looks like it can do, and to do what I'm already doing.

I have it giving me the display that the team macnn page does at seti@home, showing the name units, time for each of the members. There is, under the File menu, a Data Analysis Window that shows data for teams but I can't find Team MacNN in the list. Is it there?

The other thing i'd like to get the program to do, which you sort of indicate it can do, is show me the performance of individual team members over time. Can I see that my own performance has grown this week over last? I can't find any way that seti checker does that.

I have had no trouble with stability with seti checker. It is fast and useful. I've been running it since 3/15 but haven't played with the data analysis window beyond seeing it was there because I really didn't have a need to compare clubs. If you say it can show individual users (as I did above), then this suddenly is much more interesting to me.

Thanks for any help.


------------------
Tadd Torborg

[wlonh]

well, no... SETI Checker does not do exactly what you do in comparing the daily output of each Team MacNN member. it would facilitate the preparation of that sort of thing though. it does show each member and their stats from moment to moment under the 'Team' tab, you enter the name for our team (Team MacNN) in the field labeled 'Team:' and then select 'clubs' in the 'Team Type:' dropmenu. now note there is a tiny arrow under the 'Team:' field that turns into the familiar Contextual Menu cursor and this will allow you to 'rebuild' the team list... just 'poke around' SETI Checker and you will figure out all its features.

and as for the club listings and why Team MacNN is not listed, i guess because we don't have enough members yet to register on the radar yet... i do not know how many members we need to be on that list... drat! i'd like to use that feature of SETI (the Group tab) though i realize the only way MacNN could really look kinda good next to the bigger teams is in our team average crunch time per work unit... because we have a pretty decent team average of 13hrs 58min per SETI unit.

and oh yes, any time you need to you can delete the SETI Checker pref's file and start fresh, you will not lose any data per se, but you will have to set your Team MacNN "TEAM tab" settings

[This message has been edited by wlonh (edited 03-26-2000).]

[wlonh]

i have contacted the folks who created SETI Checker as to why TEAM MacNN does not appear under the 'Groups' tab in SETI Checker...

waiting for a response...

[OoklaTheMok]

I think it does not appear because the team is not in the top 100.

I also have had serious crash problems with SETI Checker. Also something else to remember, using the SETI unit manager means that every 50th unit gets credited to Team MacAddict. I decided not to use it at all since by the time my home computer has finished a unit, over 50 have been added to my total from my other machines...this would effectively mean that my home computer wouldn't be helping me at all.

Anyway, if you want to get real-time team stats so you can keep accurate records on daily performance, this is the link to use. The other one with the team id can go hours before being updated. The team lists are also now showing more than 200 members, if you hadn't noticed...but this won't benefit you for a while yet.

[wlonh]

thanks ookla, for the thinly-veiled putdown.

[OoklaTheMok]

You're welcome.

[parisblue]

Just days before you guys started talking about setting up a MacNN group I started one of my own using two different email addresses (at different work locations). However, I'm willing to give up personal glory (NOT) for the greater good of the MacNN team. Any ideas as to how I can do this? (This thread has become so long I will admit that I haven't read all the messages posted, so if the reply to my question is up there somewhere apologies in advance.)

Also, is anybody out there, by any chance, running SETI on a PPC8100 upgraded with a 250Mhz/512k Sonnet Crescendo upgrade card? I can't believe the difference in speeds between that machine and one running on a PPC8500 upgraded with a 300Mhz/1MB Crescendo card. The former takes on average 22.5 hours and the latter 10.5 hours. Any explanations out there?

[parisblue]

Ignore the first bit of the above message. I've just managed to switch allegiances - though my previous credits won't get counted for Team MacNN. However, the questions about the upgraded Macs still stands.

[tadd]

parisblue, the biggest difference in performance I've seen in a single machine is whether or not you are running the program with the display showing. In other words, the fastest way to run it is in screen saver giving the screen saver permission to blank the screen.

One of the things I'd like to see in a Mac seti@home effort is a separate participant entry for each and every Mac. Doing so would allow an owner of a 233Mhz 512K cache G3 to see what other owners of a 233Mhz 512K cache G3 are able to eek out of their machines. Doing so would also allow us to stick it in the nose of Wintel owners as to how bloody fast our east-to-use Macintoshes are (since most fast seti@home participants are running obscure and inscrutable OSs).

I too had separate logins for each of my machines when I started this. wlonh has said that having multiple entries per participant is against the rules. Since wlonh is the moderator we follow that advise.

------------------
Tadd Torborg

[wlonh]

well, i did not say that it is, in the most strictest of terms, against the rules.

and please let's not get into a semantic argument here. suffice to say that it is a 'one person, one vote' situation. generally speaking, can you join any other sort of team or club as more than one person? nope, because you are only one person until they start cloning humans.

regardless of whatever good intentions are, it is plain as the nose on anyone's face that the PPC chip slaughters the unINTELligent CISC architecture.

i think that competition between Mac owners having the same 233MHz Mac (for example) and comparing their SETI times is best done privately between friends that own said similar Macs. the competition is, as i see it, between CISC and RISC and not between individuals.

and i have said previously that possibly catching ET 'phoning home' is nearly secondary to the paradigm that SETI has created... a monster network the likes of which has never been seen before. this has great implications for future scientific endeavors which require vast computational power that can not be served from/located in any one place! this is the great accomplishment of SETI.

that, and the fact that it helps us Mac users show the world who has the fastest chip architecture!

please. try to give me SOME benefit of the doubt here, i did start this Team MacNN, i work hard to help folks on the forums... and i hate to always have to cover my ass for it and explain why such and such is, etc...

i am a VOLUNTEER. i get NOTHING from this except the satisfaction of helping others.
My Macs and all the Macs in my family are as bloody damn close to perfect as is possible, i MUST be doing something right!

(and, i get flamed for it by a choice few!)

[tadd]

As of April 3, the total for the past week is 443 units
# of work units completed for the week:
units - name
96 chris
34 siboett
28 Tadd
25 Thomas Richard
23 ironknee
20 kate
17 Dave McSherry
17 jeffreyloaf/G3-350
14 Buckaroo Banzai-1
13 Donguido
13 mark
12 blake
11 John Osborn
10 Al cacicedo
10 John L. Becker
9 nycdewd
9 blank
8 Mulder and Scully
7 nathan_ford
7 steve rosenberg
7 Mike Elness
7 kaiser_soce
6 Tony Butcher
6 pdjr
5 Yaw Anokwa
5 Houston
4 tpw
4 Silverhawk
4 Joe
3 parisblue
3 aeacus
3 Benjamin Everson
3 YWadiaG4


------------------
Tadd Torborg

[tadd]

April 10, 2000
We're up to 455 units a week but in my Apr 10 data set I lost David McSherry (17/week) and Donguido(13/week)! Where'd you go? I counted their progress up until Apr 8.
Welcome to japruss and FireWire!
Here are the remaining top contributers showing their work for the week ending April 10.
114 chris
28 siboett
27 Tadd
26 Thomas Richard
24 ironknee
20 kate
18 jeffreyloaf/G3-350
16 Buckaroo Banzai-1
15 mark
13 blank
13 pdjr
12 John Osborn
10 nycdewd
10 blake
9 John L. Becker
9 kaiser_soce
9 nathan_ford
8 Mike Elness
7 Mulder and Scully
6 Yaw Anokwa
5 Houston
5 steve rosenberg
5 TRS
5 parisblue
5 Joe
5 Silverhawk
4 Al cacicedo
4 aeacus
3 tpw
2 meko


------------------
Tadd Torborg

[This message has been edited by tadd (edited 04-12-2000).]

[Todd Madson]

G4/400 Sawtooth: 4.75 to 6 hrs depending on what I'm doing. App is minimized and screen blanked when not using the machine. Not using the ramdisk yet. 6400/180: 36-37 hours per block - screen blanked after 1 minute and is minimized when displaying.
We just started my wife's imac dv se today.
I've done 91 blocks as of this morning. I have a guitar players team "guitarists
surfin for the alien", but join the macnn
team - they need the help! My speedup recommendations: 9.04 has altivec memory move optimizations - g4 users should
upgrade. Try running with ramdisk and also try leaving it going when you're not there. Stand by.

Hey everyone. I just joined Team MacNN.

MacNN has been my first internet stop every morning for years now, and because I run SETI@home whenever I'm not using my computer I figured I might as well put the two together. My first unit was crunched on my old Performa 6200CD and took 180 hours, but now I'm using a G4 350/AGP and I've been going through them just a little bit faster. I've been using a ram disk but I haven't until now had my screen set to go blank after a minute like what's been suggested here. So up till this point it's been taking around 10-11 hours for each unit. I'm hoping I can start seeing better times like some of the other people on the team are getting with their G4's. I'll post the difference, if I see one, in a couple of days.

BTW I'm the 50th member on the team!

[jeffreyloaf]

Congradulations Russel Mazzei ! The big Five 0. If any body would like to get the most out of their machine go to my idisk (jeffreyhomyak) and download process info.app; it's the only thing there. How to use- launch seti then launch process info and use it kill anything that is stealing cycles from seti. Yes you should kill the finder, it will restart the finder when you quit seti. This also works for games. I use it all of the time and my mac does dial in and gets new blocks when needed. Also use the ram disk for best possible speed.
Later later alligators or E T s.
Ps don't kill any third party mice or your machine wont wake from sleep(restart and lose your work) also kill process info too.

[This message has been edited by jeffreyloaf (edited 04-13-2000).]

[wlonh]

hey i have had that ProcessInfo.app and never thought to use it for SETI, now there's a good idea...

thanks!

and welcome team member number 50, Russel Mazzei

[Todd Madson]

Thanks for the idea on killing un-needed processes that can interfere with Seti @ home. I downloaded and tried peek-a-boo which allows for setting priorities for different programs and tasks running in the system. I made everything low priority and gave Seti high priority and still notice about a 6 hour per block average. I'm going to try for shutting all processes down today while I'm at work except for Seti and see what that does. By the way, I should mention that I noticed a very significant difference in FPU performance with LibMotoSh. I realize the controversy regarding this extension, but the change in my MacBench5.0 scores couldn't be ignored - they were over 40% faster with this installed. Stand by...

[wlonh]

hey, Todd... i too use libmoto for the reasons you stated... and i had posted previously in a seti thread (maybe this one) that tho' libmoto is controversial, etc...

hey if it works, use it

Hmmm. Got my Pismo 500 up and running SETI 1.06. Clocking in around 7 hours 45 minutes, using a RAM disk. Are any susbequent SETI versions faster?

Overall not bad, though, considering my lumbering Dell PC at work clocks in at around 35 hours...!

[wlonh]

well the latest versions are only a bit slower and not because of MacOS! others will claim otherwise.

SETI@home came right out and said many months ago that the newer versions would run a bit slower and partially (if not mostly) because of the modified display which now includes the 'curve fitting' animation.

and though of course your mileage may vary, the 2.03 and 2.04 versions have not demonstrated much of a decrease in speed.

but sometimes yes, sometimes no... you must bear in mind that all SETI workunits were NOT created equally... some will process much faster than others due to the varying content of workunits.

i am currently crunching SETI workunits at about 7 hours average since i put a 466MHz G3 ZIF into my beige minitower... but i have crunched a few at 6 hours flat.

Just a quick update in the difference in speed I'm seeing crunching units after I changed my setting for the screen to go blank after 1 minute. 10-11 hours per unit before, just over 7 hours now! !

[tadd]

For the week ending April 15 our team has produced 463 blocks/week!
We have a few new contributers this week, Shayne, japrus, Firewire, proux, a new blank person, xYankee, squareman@work, Russel Mazzel, I might have missed a few. WELCOME. Note that I only count the blocks that I was able to record after each newcomer joined team MacNN. Some of these people are cranking out large numbers per day and it will be interesting to see how they place in the next week's list.
Here's this week's contributions:
108 chris
29 pdjr
25 Tadd
22 Donguido
21 kate
20 siboett
20 ironknee
15 Thomas Richard
14 jeffreyloaf/G3-350
13 mark
13 Buckaroo Banzai-1
12 nycdewd
12 Dave McSherry
10 blank
10 kaiser_soce
9 John L. Becker
9 John Osborn
8 nathan_ford
8 xYankee
8 blake
7 Mike Elness
6 Al cacicedo
6 steve rosenberg
6 Houston
6 Yaw Anokwa
6 TRS
5 Silverhawk
5 Joe
4 Mulder and Scully
4 squareman@work
4 tpw
4 parisblue
4 aeacus
3 Russel Mazzel
1 Dave
1 meko
1 Shayne


------------------
Tadd Torborg

[pdjr]

I've read about some controversial extensions that might speed processing. Where can I get them? =)

[wlonh]

you must mean LibMotoSh

it is available at Moto's site: http://www.mot.com/SPS/PowerPC/libra..._download.html

[Todd Madson]

Libmoto, whether it appears to work or not significantly raises my FP performance in benchmark programs to the point where it literally cannot be ignored. Almost 50% higher. Visually it is difficult to detect, however, I firmly believe it does make a difference (for some reason it is much more noticeable on my slower 180 mhz 603ev machine). Try it, see how it works for you. It may be worth your while to try one the same block with and without it and time it to see a difference. I have not done so, but I have seen that my block times have gone from the six-seven hours timeframe to the high fives and lower sixes. Unusual.

[OoklaTheMok]

If you want to do a seti benchmark, there's a good page here with a standard benchmark work unit here

I benched it in VirtualPC on my iMac DV just for fun but they still haven't put the result up yet. (It was somewhat less than 24 hours, can't remember).

Hi all, I have a problem that I hope someone can help me with. I have been running Seti (v2.03) on a G4/350/agp for a couple of months and getting good results (averaging 6-7 hours per unit). After updating the MacOS from OS 9.0 to 9.04 my times dropped drastically (to an average of 20 hours per unit!!!) I did a clean install back to OS 9.0 and reinstalled Seti, but my times are not returning to where they were. Any ideas out there?

Thanks in advance,
Dennis

[tadd]

What conditions are you running it under? Screen saver mode? Launched in the foreground? With display on? In the background? Window-shaded?
There are some conditions that could slow it down although I haven't seen any on my computers. I'm still getting the same times with 9.04 as I did with 9.

------------------
Tadd Torborg

[tadd]

For the week ending April 20 our team has produced 592 blocks/week. I think there may be a time of day where the scores reported are getting updated. These numbers seem higher than last time for almost everybody so I suspect that the total for the week may be a day inflated. I suspect that the order of contributors is pretty accurate though.
We seem to have lost Houston and meko. What happened?
We gained a 3rd blank person. This could make keeping track of their scores a little difficult.
113 chris
40 xYankee
41 pdjr
29 Tadd
22 siboett
25 Donguido
21 Russel Mazzel
19 kate
16 mark
16 proux
16 Yaw Anokwa
15 ironknee
14 jeffreyloaf/G3-350
14 Thomas Richard
13 FireWire
13 nycdewd
12 Buckaroo Banzai-1
11 Dave McSherry
11 John Osborn
11 squareman@work
10 John L. Becker
10 Mike Elness
9 japruss
9 Joe
9 nathan_ford
8 Al cacicedo
8 blake
8 Silverhawk
8 steve rosenberg
8 TRS
7 blank
5 kaiser_soce
5 Mulder and Scully
4 parisblue
4 Shayne
3 aeacus
3 tpw
2 Benjamin Everson


------------------
Tadd Torborg

Tadd, I've mostly been running it in screen saver mode, although I've tried launching the program and window-shaded, with no change. The point is, the settings are the same as when my times were around 6.5 hours, now they are 3 times that! It's really quite puzzling.

Dennis

[Todd Madson]

I have a screen capture of my Sawtooth G4/400 at the point where it got 100%, just over 6 hours. I'm running 9.04. I am running LibMoto. I am running it in windowshade mode (minimized for your PC folks), and I have it blank the screen after 1 minute. I also am attempting to try the app "Peek-a-Boo" and killing other processes except for Seti @ Home (that drive indexing scheduler is cpu hungry, and who needs the control strip if I'm at work? and why not kill the finder and even Peek-a-Boo while I'm at it). LibMoto made a big different on the FP front, but there are other things too. Screen res I'm using is 1152 x 874 @ millions. Virtual memory is off. Speaking of additional speed: the non-Sawtooth G4 machine here at work has 192 megs of ram and it feels much faster than my machine does. I only have 128 megs of ram at this point. I suspect additional ram (like a 128 meg dimm) would make a difference as far as Seti goes. I think I'll buy a 2-2-2 128 meg dimm soon and see what happens. I just know I can get into the 5 hour area again.

[wlonh]

Todd, i believe that according to the SETI readme you can get seti to run a bit faster at lower res and thousands

i say i believe i read that, check the facts

you can also try ProcessInfo.app for free and it will kill any processes you want

[Todd Madson]

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll give it a try.

[jeffreyloaf]

dj, 1st, double check that virtual memory is turned off. (I think 9.04 turns it back on). 2nd, check that you don't have two copies of seti running. I have had both of these happen. (Too much tweaking; no way).
Os 9.04 feels just a tad slower but I'm going to do a fresh install from the ground up on my second hard drive and see if it helps any.

Jeffrey, vm is off. I have 256 mb of ram on this machine (which currently is at only 71% after 27 hours!) No other apps are running and there are no other copies of SETI running. I thought I may have found the problem when I turned off the auto-indexing feature in Sherlock, but no.

Still working at it.
Dennis

[wlonh]

drat, i wish i had some ideas for you... the only one i have is try version 2.04

i have noticed a few quirks with running SETI using a RAM disk on a G3 connected to a small Mac network (mine), but no speed issues

[Todd Madson]

Well, I tried using 256 colors versus thousands or millions and noted no appreciable difference. Yes, I am using accelerated video on my main machine so maybe that had a factor. I would presume my older slower machine would go faster at 256 or even 16 colors. That might be interesting to try out. Anything to speed up processing there. I would imagine more ram might speed some things up as well.

[zac4mac]

Todd, when's the last time you rebuilt your desktop and defragged/optimized your drive? Units are small but can still get fragmented, especially with HFS+. Try Norton 5 to clean the drive and DiskWarrior to smooth the directories.

[Todd Madson]

I've done the maintenance fairly recently however I found that the greatest boost in processing speed was the PowerLogix cache control software, oddly enough. Increasing the speed of my L2 cache to 267 mhz from 199 mhz has shaved close to 20 minutes off of my best processing time for Seti @ Home. My CPU score in MacBench 5.0 went from 128% to 135% (1350) and my floating point measurements increased by a percent (196%). Not bad at all although your mileage may vary.

[wlonh]

DiskWarrior, yes, it will optimize directories and that can help and rebuilding the desktop (use techtool 1.2.1 freeware) can help too but make no mistake about Speed Disk, it will not improve matters in the way of speed, period.

of course Disk Doctor could find some errors and clean them up but Speed Disk will not and does not improve performance, unless you have an OLD and slow Mac, in which case you may see a very slight improvement but only if your HD is very badly fragmented

Directory optimization is not the same as HD fragmentation... any disk space fragmentation can be ignored, that is unless you have a very old and slow Mac...

[pdjr]

What is Windowshade? Is it when you launch Seti and then double-click the title bar to collapse the window? Forgive my stupidity. I recently switched from an ugly beige box to my fab iMac DV.

[wlonh]

yup that is windowshade, you got it