After a 10 year sabbatical I'm finally back into SETI@home. In 2000 I wrote SetiWatch and SetiLog. That seems like a lifetime ago.

I've been reading these forums for the past couple of months trying to catch up. Understanding all the acronyms used by you brilliant men and women can be a challenge! Personally I think many noobs find it intimidating / confusing and back away. Has anybody put together a glossary of terms used in these forums?

Ok, now on to a question that has plagued mankind for centuries… Can somebody please explain to me what the purpose of Lunatics is? I’ve never found a clear description anywhere and strangely their website does not say what it does either.

http://lunatics.kwsn.info/index.php

Cheers
Mark

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Hm... do you have images disabled?
Very tops 2 lines say: SETI@home optimized apps and info... quite clear even for Russian-speaking actually ;)

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SETI apps news
We're not gonna fight them. We're gonna transcend them.

Purpose of Lunatics ? i counter this with a question: What is your purpose?

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"Living by the wisdom of computer science doesn't sound so bad after all. And unlike most advice, it's backed up by proofs." -- Algorithms to live by: The computer science of human decisions.

Welcome back Mark!

I've been reading these forums for the past couple of months trying to catch up. Understanding all the acronyms used by you brilliant men and women can be a challenge! Personally I think many noobs find it intimidating / confusing and back away.

I agree!!! I have an IT background and I stayed away from posting in the Number Crunching forum for about a month. My recomendation would be to start a new forum grouping similar to Number Crunching that would be for the very technical posts/threads... like something entitled: "Tech Talk", "Guru Zone" or something of the sort. That way NC could be more inline with its original description: "Credit, leaderboards, CPU performance"

Has anybody put together a glossary of terms used in these forums

In my 2 months here, I haven't seen one and I think it would be a big benefit. I'd even like to help out.

Ok, now on to a question that has plagued mankind for centuries… Can somebody please explain to me what the purpose of Lunatics is? I’ve never found a clear description anywhere and strangely their website does not say what it does either. http://lunatics.kwsn.info/index.php

That is the primary reason why I only started to use Lunatics during the last month. (Another reason was to see how high my RAC would rise on stock but I gave up waiting!)
If I had to share my internalized definition of Lunatics, I'd write:
It's a little program that will modify and optimize your current S@H setup by adding a few optimized apps for the CPU (and GPU if you have one) that take advantage of your computer's particular technology.
Most of your original S@H files will remain unchanged (I might be wrong on this point).
You should try it as it's easy to revert back to the original setup by doing a "Reset" on the S@H project (but please empty your task list/queue/cache before installing Lunatics v0.44 or "Reset"ting back to the original S@H configuration.

Hope this helps,
Rob :-}

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I get it, I really do, and some other development participants will attest to that in their own time.

My point here is that it is YOU that makes, and continues to make Lunatics what it is.

It is a representative for rational thought contributing to the science in subtle ways, and occasionally disruptive ones, so as to further our common goals. These goals are toward extracting evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence from the data we are given, in a robust way.

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"Living by the wisdom of computer science doesn't sound so bad after all. And unlike most advice, it's backed up by proofs." -- Algorithms to live by: The computer science of human decisions.

Hi Raistmer,

I saw you name while looking at the source code yesterday. I didn't realizes you were Russian. I work with some very smart Russian doctors. They are an absolute blast.

Images are enabled. I was just hoping for something a little more detailed than 5 words.

From what I understand you take the stock application and then optimize it. Is your optimized version ever incorporated back into the stock version? Or does the optimized version eventually become the stock version?

Thanks for the time you put into SETI. I appreciate it and I'm sure many other people do too.

Cheers
Mark

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From what I understand, most of the "stock" applications are written by the lunatics team as Seti no longer has a budget to pay someone to write the code.

But they are meant for "average" user without modification

The lunatics versions take it to the next step. Intended to the more aggressive user who wants more out of their system.

As such, the modified apps require more tailoring by the individual and place more demand on the computer

Hi Jason,

My purpose is simple: To fill my little brain with knowledge about SETI@home.

Lunatics is mentioned in the forums all the time so it seems to play a pretty big role. If I can get more out of my hardware I will certainly use it. I just want to understand what it is and how it works.

Cheers
Mark

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Hi Rob,

I will start to put together a glossary when I find some time. I'll pass it off to you when I have something. Not sure where to post it yet.

Thanks for your explication on Lunatics. I’m not allowing any new tasks so my work units will dry out tomorrow sometime. I will then install Lunatics and see what happens. Right now my guppi work units take 22 minutes and Arecibo 10 minutes. It will be interesting to see what the Lunatics version achieves.

Cheers
Mark

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If I can get more out of my hardware I will certainly use it.

I took a quick look at your "Computers" and concentrated on your most productive one: hostid=7906450:
- it has a stable RAC ~8.5K so it has been performing at a fairly constant output for ~2months.

In import of host.gz from the end of May, the top computers with a Xeon E3-1xxx and no GPU had a RAC in the 7K-8K range, and the top performer without GPU (host_id 7805108) had 8.1K and it isn't even running Lunatics apps!

My guesstimate is that with Lunatics (best version tbd), it will easily reach a RAC of 10k, and with a bit of tweaking possibly even 12k!
I will even venture that a 50% increase in productivity might be possible.

What else do you need to take give it a try?!?

Cheers,
Rob :-}

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Good info Zalster, That helps quite a bit.

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I had already forgotten that SoG is part of stock and I wasn't quick enough to edit my previous post! See revision:

... with Lunatics (best version tbd), it will easily likely reach a RAC of 10k, and with a bit of tweaking possibly even 12k 11k!
I will even venture that a 50% 33% increase in productivity might be possible

...[added]by swapping some task between the CPU and GPU. More to come on this in the days ahead.

(to gurus: feel free to adjust my #s based on your experience)

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I've been reading these forums for the past couple of months trying to catch up. Understanding all the acronyms used by you brilliant men and women can be a challenge! Personally I think many noobs find it intimidating / confusing and back away. Has anybody put together a glossary of terms used in these forums?

Here is some leisure reading.  Scroll down to section 4.  

Just a bit of a helpful hint, your computer with the 650TI in it would do well with GPU crunching. But......you probably have a W10 update on that computer and every W10 update that I get wipes out the drivers for my video cards. You have to reinstall the video drivers from the NVIDA site doing a "Custom Install" then Clean Install. That will get your drivers properly installed.

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SETI@home classic workunits 4,019
SETI@home classic CPU time 34,348 hours

Hi Rob,

7906450 is not a dedicated cruncher. It's a laptop I use every day to make money. I already feel somewhat uncomfortable running SETI on it 24x7. I don’t want to stress it more than I have to. I would rather crunch more efficiently using less power than increase my credits. Do you think Lunatics would help me out here?

When I find the money I'm going to setup a dedicated cruncher.

Cheers
Mark

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Thanks for the link. I wish I knew about it a few months ago. ;-)

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Unfortunately the 650TI card was recently returned to its rightful owner when it was found missing. The perpetrator is still at large... cough cough ;-)

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7906450 is not a dedicated cruncher. ... Do you think Lunatics would help me out here?

Since it isn't a dedicated cruncher, it might be difficult to assess the improvement from installing Lunatics.
Take a baseline of the time it takes to run the diff types of WU for each device (CPU & 2 GPUs).
Installing BoincTasks is beneficial for such a baseline since you don't have to keep an eye out for the end of a task in the Boinc Manager, or for times when there are many tasks that are "Ready to Report". It savse a history file in CVS format that can easily be imported in a spreadsheet.

Lunatics will help you install the best CPU app for your i7 CPU.
I don't know if the power consumption would go up for the SSEx or AVX apps.
Others can fill us in on that.
I think the big boost in power consumption comes from overclocking and running multiple WUs on high-end GPUs in order to attain close to optimal throughput. On my 2 identical primary rigs, the heat and noise rises quite a bit in the room they are in. Each has a GTX 750 Ti (~70W max & 1 big fan); they are known to be lower on power and noise than most GTXs. I have no problem imagining how those who have a small farm of crunchers use it to heat a good part of their home in winter!

Do you have a dedicated cruncher (with or w/o a GPU) that you could install Lunatics on?

R :-}

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