Before you read this, please note I'm not objecting to BOINC or against new kinds of software.

All I want is a rational, direct, scientific answer to my question that doesn't involve incredibly general comments about progress and moving on.

Here goes...

It's been said very often on here that the main reason they're requiring people to upgrade from SETI Classic to BOINC is because they didn't have enough SETI work units to go around. BOINC would let other research projects in on the action so the processing power doesn't go to waste.

The example often given is that the SETI WUs had to be processed 2 or 3 times but with classic were being processed 20 or 30 times.

When I got BOINC I expected to be constantly running short of work units, yet every time BOINC has requested more SETI work for my computer, it's always obtained it.

I'm averaging about 18 credits a day, and BOINC usually running for an hour or a couple of hours a day in total. I think I'm a typical casual user.


My question is this: why does a casual user like me have to upgrade to BOINC when there's clearly no shortage of SETI work units for my computer?


I know there's also measures needed against cheating, but surely these could have been taken with a new version of Classic.

It allows more flexibility, and different work size units. It also allows multiple science projects all to be used by a single program.

I think it's a great step forward for any sciences.

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My movie https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/502242

And since there are powerusers out there and BOINC is happily up and running, it would cost too many resources to run both systems (seti and boinc). Just consider it the new seti version.

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[b]phees solutions[b][br]
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Hi,

You've asked a good question and hence I hope I can give some good answers.

1) The new BOINC software allows more "crunching" of the data and hence more results can be learned from whatever Arecibo produces. Newer CPU's running at ever higher speeds can do more "work" and hence in future even more analysis might be possible for both SETI and other projects in order to use up the extra CPU popwer available.

2) The new BOINC software automatically "caches" extra WU's (depending on your preferences) and hence can keep your CPU crunching even if SETI goes offline. (The old SETI could do with but only with 3rd aprty software, which for many people was a pain to set-up).

3) The new BOINC software also allows other projects to use your CPU, based on your preferences, for when your main project runs dry - most of my PC's run SETI + 1 other project, as there's plenty of processing power in most PC's these days to allow you to support multiple projects.

4) The cheating element was also needing to be addressed - there was talk of people running one WU, getting it up to around 99% and then stopping it and copying the entire folder onto multiple PC's and re-starting SETI@home on each of the new PC's. Hence you could get multiple credits for crunching just one WU.

So, that meant some WU's were processed maybe hundreds of times, leading to extra workload for the SETI techs to unravel.

5) Many old WU's have indeed been crunched many times - and indeed it's still possible for old WU's to be crunched via BOINC, in order to substantiate the original results. Likewise other sources of data could come online - many are still waiting for Parkes Observatory in Australia to come online and with extra sensors being positioned at Arecibo, it's very probable that we'll never run out of WU's in the future. And using the BOINC infrastructure allows easier upgrading to allow all of this (rather than having a bespoke application that may need upgrading everytime).

6) BOINC also supports version sensitive downloads - if the new WU's you've downloaded needs a different version of the crunching core, it'll download it for you and then if another version is required later, it'll delete the old version for you.

This keeps HDD space to a minimum and allows each application to crunch with the minimum amount of user intervention. Indeed the newer BOINC coients are starting to get very useful in terms of functionality - the new v4.43 works very well (I've installed this on 2 machines so far without any problems - have to wait for other machines local caches to drop to zero before I upgrade the other machines - seems when you upgrade the BOINC client you lose any work done of the old client).

Think I've covered most things - if not I'm sure some-one else will reply.

Timbo

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regards,
Tim
Founder, UK BOINC Team
Join us @ UK BOINC Team: http://www.ukboincteam.org.uk/newforum

Arecibo with the current seti-recorded can record roughly 270k wu/day, since SETI@home/BOINC is sending out 4 result/wu this means max 1.1M result/day.

There haven't been posted an updated info of how many result/day distributed now, but most likely somewhere in the neighborhood of 400k result/day under SETI@home/BOINC.

Classic was at 1.8M result/day before the BOINC-version was released, and seems to be oscillating around 1.3M result/day resently. If splitters lags behind "classic" will just re-issue the same group of wu infinite many times till more wu is split.

So while there is no shortage of work currently for SETI@home/BOINC, if all "classic"-users moves over the demand will be 1.5-2M result/day, or 50-100% more than the recorders capasity.