New Seti@Home Client to be Open to Other Projects

An anonymous reader writes "Seti@home is preparing to make a major change to their client and backend. The new system "boinc" will be a general purpose client and accept work units from other projects (selected by the user). This will open-up Seti@Home's millions strong user base to academic projects that cannot afford supercomputers. As boinc is an open source framework other distributed projects (think!, folding@home etc) will also be able to use it giving boinc a larger installed base than Seti@Home."

Comments

Optimizations?

[BWJones]

Will this new client allow for platform specific optimizations? For instance, the RC client took advantage of Altivec which allowed for Macs to absolutely dominate the small computer benchmarks in those ranking whereas they did not perform nearly as well in the SETI rankings. And just so the Wintel weenies don't feel left out and flame me, other platform specific optimizations could also be taken advantage of for Pentium specific calls or even SGI specific calls.