SETI@Home Transitions To BOINC

SeaDour writes "The team at SETI@Home have finally released their highly-anticipated new client software based on the BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) software platform. This new platform promises transparent version upgrades, more efficient work unit distribution, and the ability to seamlessly integrate other distributed computing projects that are also using the BOINC standard. For now, SETI@Home is allowing both the Classic and BOINC clients to run, but eventually they will shut down the Classic data server and force everyone to upgrade. You can read more about the transition here."

Comments

Re:SETI running out of Work-Units?

[Thng]

Not sure if this is before or after the news you heard, but for version 3.03, they added additional processing capability in the client so workunits would take longer to process
News posting
Text:

Added additional science coverage. We now do a thorough search out to a chirp rate of +- 20 Hz/second. The cost of the additional coverage is that clients will take longer to process a workunit

However, as 3.03 is rather old, I wouldn't be surprised if the new and faster computers and old clients that weren't upgraded negated some of the effect.

thng

BOINC

[Sunspire]

Boinc is more than just an updated Seti@Home, it's a generic delivery platform for distributed projects. That means you, yes you, can develope a BOINC app. Just gather some people to run it for you and compute away without needing any approval from the guys at Berkeley. Basically the participants enter a project URL into the BOINC application, the program then downloads your code and the crunching begins. BOINC handles all the network, workunit, results, distribution, security, versioning etc. issues for you.

Participants can even choose to split their resources among several projects, say, Seti@Home and Folding@Home. Another thing that will also be used in the new Seti@Home is that you can have clients participating in the same project working on completely different computation sets. For example, clients that have proven themselves to have a fast workunit turnaround time and a long history of participating and that have a gigabyte or more of RAM can be given special tasks that would normally be impossible because of the high number of griefers on the net.