I was just reading the paper written about SETI@home (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/cacm/cacm.html)

Now, I understand that the current SETI@home system works very well, but I believe we're working with an old system and that better things can be done.

When SETI@home was only one, two years old, we were crunching the same type of WUs we are now (stop me if I'm wrong). The paper states that SETI@home does a very thorough analysis of a very small frequency range, and one reason stated is that there are not enough resources to have the best of both worlds. There have been a few improvements to the amount of science done on a WU, but simple logic tells you that if the WU computation time does not go up that much, there is not much more computation going on.

I think SETI@home, if they don't want to switch completely over to a large WU, high science scheme, would benefit from creating a two-tiered system where people can crunch regular WUs, and others can choose to process large, CPN-type work units which would do more science than the regular WUs.

Anyway, just my thought. SETI@home has the world's largest pool of computer processing resources, and I think they could raise the bar a bit and get some more out of it.

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That is one of the reasons for going to BOINC. There is the possiblility of doing just that, relativly easily. With the old style you would have to download and install seperate programs for each type of workunit. With BOINC the seperate programs will download themselves. Or seperate programs may not be needed in some cases when different options can be passed to the executables.

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