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SETI@home: Research on the Research

Posted by Hemos on from the looking-behind-the-curtain dept.

Officer Larry writes "A professor and a graduate student at the University of South Carolina just posted a study into SETI@home work unit completion times. They came up with some pretty interesting results. It stems off Team Lamb Chop's work, but these guys are interested in how much variation there is in completion times if the same work unit is analyzed over and over again on the same system. It looks like they have other studies in the hopper. Warning: there looks to be quite a bit of statistics in this study..."

6 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. I wonder... by Moonshadow · · Score: 3

    ...how long till we have a SETI@home@home client to do this research on a distributed level...?

  2. Stats Question by frank249 · · Score: 3
    Do the n's justify the means?

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    Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.

  3. SetiSpy and WINE data by JDax · · Score: 3
    Curious that the screensaver version was used to do this study whereas most places doing benchmarking use the command line interface ("CLI" or text client).

    Also one thing that seemed to be missing from this article was reference to Roelof Englebrecht's data, collected over some period of time and posted on his SetiSpy web site here:

    http://pages.tca.net/roelof/setispy/

    Roelof and TLC's Max, are both the keepers of the TLC benchmark database and Roelof checks each and every submission to ensure that the data isn't corrupted somehow due to an unstable overclock.

    In addition, I currently run the text client in WINE on my Red Hat 6.2 as standard practice and have submitted data to the TLC page for it. It runs just fine and in fact runs the WU FASTER (whether using the -win95 switch or the -nt40 switch) than either native winblows version when run on the same system via dual boot.

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    -- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
  4. Re:Linux wussy! by tie_guy_matt · · Score: 3

    Yeah you are right. If linux had won they would have posted it on slashdot or something. Instead we are learning about the study from our psychic friends.

  5. Statistics and Analysis? by mborland · · Score: 3
    Statistics warning? I was surprised by the lack of statistics used. For one, they tried to make claims of efficiency based off of having only two reference points for each modification (speed 1 vs. speed 2; 128MB vs. 256MB). Seems like you'd need more data points to get a useful curve.

    Also, they didn't seem to consider possibilities like the fact that a default install of RH Linux may run updatedb daily, which if using a slow drive with a lot of files could easily describe the variation. Instead, their first guess is 'unstable packages.' Wazzup? Academics...they love bizarre conclusions in favor of putting in that extra effort to find the truth. They spent enough time setting up the survey...why didn't they finish the job? (Answer: they were working on a deadline...and didn't allocate time to research the variation)

  6. NO MACS ??? by 6EQUJ5 · · Score: 3


    I can't believe they didn't test any Mac platforms. Mac users are some of the most enthusiastic fans of SETI! Team MacAddict is #3 in the Club Competition , only behind Ars Technica and Team Art Bell. If fact they're almost tied with Team Art Bell, with only 5,000 users to Art Bell's 13,000 users !!

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