I'd like to say to everybody from SETI classic, thank you for BOINC. By creating BOINC and distibuting it for other projects to use SETI, in my opinion, has provided important public relations and infrastructure benefits that go far further than anything Classic SETI@home could have done without BOINC.

Public Relations

Explain DC to people nowadays, and half the time they come back with 'oh - like looking for aliens'. That is great. SETI classic was not the first DC project, nor even the first to seek participants from outside their own organisation. You were the first to succeed in getting the idea of DC across to masses of people including those with no interest in signing up. To use an analogy, you were not the Visicalc of DC, you were the Lotus 123.

Every DC project around today owes some of its support to your work. This includes projects like GIMPS that actually pre-date you. By now, when people first hear of GIMPS they probably already know about SETI@home, and the idea of sharing computer resources is no longer alien ;-) to them.

DC is not a zero-sum game at present, with the vast majority of machine cycles still going unused there is far more crunch power out there than is currently being used. Your popular project has drawn into DC far more cpu resources than your project uses - a net gain for everyone else, whether they use BOINC or not.

Infrastructure

SETI was not the first project to try to release its infrastructure for use by other projects - but you were (as far as I know) the first to completely redesign your infrastructure with a view to donors running several projects in parallel. This is technically great computing. It frees up programming time on other projects to allow their programmers to focus on the science areas they know best. Difficult issues - like how to schedule multiple cpus over multiple projects - might not get addressed on a small DC project with a tailor made scheduler; if the project chooses BOINC they get it without even knowing the issue exists.

To those unhappy with BOINC

I see on your message boards that some SETI classicists are unhappy with BOINC - give us back classic they say, and with varying amounts of politeness ;-)

Well of course a well written tailor made infrastructure better fits a project than an off-the-peg one-size-fits-all one. But it will never fit anything else.

I want to say to all from Classic SETI@home: you deserve to be proud of what your project built when your project took the BOINC approach. You deserve to be proud to part of the generosity that your project practiced when it gave BOINC to the rest of us.

After Christmas the Thank You Letter

I came to BOINC from another classic project myself - CPDN. I went through the same reluctance. Yes BOINC has its sharp edges which can be tiresome. But the advantage to crunchers is it lets us sample other projects easily; the advantage to projects is it helps them exist at all; and the advantage of that to crunchers is that it gives us all more choice.

So here am I, someone whose priorities will always be with CPDN, Einstein, and with Orbit (when it comes online). I joined SETI@home on Christmas Day 2005 specifically to crunch a couple of wu so I could make this posting, my thank you letter to SETI:

thank you to all early joiners of SETI Classic for giving your project the user base from which they could build;

thank you to anyojne who ever crunched a classic SETI wu for building the credibility of Distributed Computing, and

thank you SETI for BOINC.

River~~

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I second this.

Thank you so much. :-)

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"I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me