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SETI@Home Close to Half-Billionth Result

Posted by timothy on from the why-if-I-only-had-a-nickel-for-every dept.

Jonathan writes: "SETI@Home, the largest distributed computing project in the world, is on the verge of receiving its 500 millionth result. This is a major milestone for both the project and distributed computing as a whole. Oh, and if you still need some added incentive to get involved, there's a $500 reward for the user who returns the milestone result."

2 of 312 comments (clear)

  1. Quite a bargain... by KFury · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Not that I'm critical, but just because it's amusing: $500 is the prize for the half-billionth unit. That equates to 0.0001 cents per 17-hour CPU unit.

    Looked at another way, the total number of FP operations to reach the 0.5 gigaunit mark is 1.5319e21. The brand new NEC Earth Simulator runs at 35,600 gigaflops. At that rate, the world's fastest supercomputer would take 43030061.73 seconds, or 498 days, to do the job.

    I wish I could lease the world's fastest computer for $1 a day...

    --

    Kevin Fox
  2. My spare cycles go to the GIMPS by circletimessquare · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. A Mersenne Prime is of the form 2^x-1. Five have been found so far through GIMPS.

    If it's money you want, it's $100,000 to the GIMPS for the first person who can catch a ten million digit prime number, and then split up according to the rules on this page.

    If it's nobility you want, the money is awarded by the EFF to spur on cooperative computing.

    BTW, it was a Slashdot story that clued me in in the first place.

    --
    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it