Would anybody eplain to me the meaning of a WU's names? Or maybe a useful link?
For example: 08au03ab.28481.2178.117304.159_4
It's clear that "08au03" is the date the WU is recorded. And how about the additional "ab"? Maybe Arecibo?
And I have no idea about the rest of the numbers.
Thanks in advance for any help

I think you are correct, the 08au03 is the date the data was recorded. The ab is simply the way the data is split up (if you look on server status page on the SETI Classic page you will see that data units are split into aa and ab groups). The rest is either star map info like degrees in lattitude longitude, or just a random number. It could also involve signal strength and frequency. I don't know for sure about the babble of numbers at the end but, those are my guesses. However the 08au03 is the date and ab is just how the WU is split, I do know that much.

Most days there's recorded too much data to fit on one tape, so the tapes is named "aa" & "ab". 08au03ab will therefore be 2nd tape this day.
Don't know for 28481.2178.117304, but .159 is explained by this:

"SETI@home looks at 2.5 MHz of data, centered at 1420 MHz. This is still too broad a spectrum to send to you for analysis, so we break this spectrum space up into 256 pieces, each 10 kHz wide" (actually a little less than 10 kHz)

These pieces is numbered .0 to .255, so .159 is piece #160.

And new for BOINC, _4 is "result" #5 for this wu. Since they've stopped to send these out randomly, you're the 5th getting assigned this result. Getting higher than _2 means either someone didn't return before deadline, or an error happened.

BTW, a little look shows 2178 pops up inside the wu also, called "last block done"... so atleast not a random number...

Thanks, I didn't know that much about the WU # so I i did the best I could for explanation sakes. Now THIS is what boards are for...learning something new.

Thank you for the info, Ingleside :) Very detailed explanation :)

so am I to understand that the last number _6 for example is the 6th time a work unit has been sent out? Now remember I'm not complaining about lack of work(although that has certainly been true). This puter is working on 10 work units in the cache. Here's the last number of each: _3, _3, _4, _3, _4, _6, _6, _6, _5, and _7. Does this mean Seti is not creating new units and only sending out old ones?

> so am I to understand that the last number _6 for example is the 6th time a
> work unit has been sent out? Now remember I'm not complaining about lack of
> work(although that has certainly been true). This puter is working on 10 work
> units in the cache. Here's the last number of each: _3, _3, _4, _3, _4, _6,
> _6, _6, _5, and _7. Does this mean Seti is not creating new units and only
> sending out old ones?
>
_0, _1, and _2 are sent out originally. If for some reason, they are not returned before deadline, or have errors, they are sent again. When there are three matching results, no more copies are sent out. Since quite a few people have detached and reattached, or left the project, there are quite a few over deadline. It is also possible that because of the recent (long) downtime, some results may not have been returned before the transitioner sent out new copies because the originals were late. I believe that I had unreturned results on my HD from mid July. When things are running smoothly, as they were for the last part of Beta, _0, _1, and _2 were sent out, and occasionally higher numbers were sent out. I expect that this will cure itself over the course of the next week or so assuming that there is no further significant downtime.

Thanks everyone, I have added this material to the FAQ and Glossary. I hope to catch up with some of these changes...

Now, if I can only find out what the middle 3 numbers mean and how they are interpreted.