Profile: Tom M

Personal background
I am semi-retired (eg. I used to drive a Semi) ;) I live in Kansas in the middle of the United States.

As a former Computer Bulletin Board SysOp I used to tinker with my PC's. This hobby allows me to continue to do that. I am down from 7 pcs to 2. Because I want this to be a hobby, not an obsession I am currently struggling with the decision about upgrading to a faster GPU :) I have GTX 750 Ti's on my two machines. One of them could run a GTX 1060. Sigh.

Like a large number of participants I have at least 1 machine that pretty much does nothing but crunch numbers. My other machine crunch's unless I need to do something with it. I also own a Chrome book which doesn't lend itself to Seti number crunching but does a very good imitation of a high end Ultra-book (12 hours battery time, really thin, really light).
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
1.Why do you run SETI@home?
As a long time Science Fiction reader I want to participate in answering the question "Where are they?"

2.What are your views about the project?
It is clear that we need more financial donors to both support hardware, software development and staff. Its amazing the amount of volunteer as well as paid software development that has gone into this project.

3.Any suggestions?
I have experimented with a late-model AMD A-10 and have come to the same conclusion as a lot of people. Until the latest generation from AMD, not having a number crunching core for each cpu core slows down production. Go Intel CPU/Nvidia GPU!

Change reports to show active participants rather than ALL participants. Change the reports verbiage to make that distinction. Report TOTAL participants elsewhere.

Don't use Laptops on this project unless that is all you own. Use a cooling table if you are using a Laptop.
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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.