SETI@home Classic Shuts Down - December 15, 2005
| So the final day of SETI@home Classic was finally upon us.
In the morning we made sure all servers were up and stable.
Once ready, we started the shutdown procedure at noon. Court and Matt
broke out their digital cameras... Too bad Dan, Eric, and Kevin were all out at an NSF meeting today. They missed out on the fun. (click on images for larger versions) | |
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Matt eating lunch at his desk just before the shutdown command is issued. As Court is taking this picture Matt is making sure the bag he used to convey his sandwich doesn't say anything embarrassing on it (like "Pet Food Express"). Though obscured, it's worth noting he's wearing a rare early version of the SETI@home Classic t-shirt. |
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Here's Jeff at his desk. He's the one who's been doing most of the work recompiling the dbserver (the program that receives and sends results/workunits over the internet) so that it issues proper warning messages to Classic clients and stops sending new work. Nobody else has touched that code in years. |
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Here we go. Jeff is about to bring it down. |
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Actual screen shot of the xterm window just after "Enter" was pressed. At this point Classic has already sent out its last workunit. |
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We actually had no celebration planned, but then Court whipped out the champagne. |
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Popping the cork... |
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Serving it up... |
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This picture accurately demonstrates our lack of funding, as this is
the only kind of party SETI@home can afford. Seems like somebody should make an animation out of these last three photos. |
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David arrived at this point and we took a few moments to reminisce about the early days. It's been about 10 years since the idea was first hatched, so there are plenty of war stories. The question was raised: "if we could do it all over again, what would we do differently (or the same)?" This led to deep discussion, which somebody should have recorded. |
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Matt getting on his soapbox about lessons learned over the past 8 years. |
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Okay everybody - back to work. |
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SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.