SETI update, interesting facts

[Raj Mathur <raju@xxxxxxx>]

OK, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence continues.  Some
factoids which have come to my notice since I first downloaded the
program and started running it...

1.  Who's the fastest?

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/stats/users.html (~130K) says that
Sun is the group (note, NOT company) with the largest number of
submitted results.  Team SGI (of which I'm part) is at number 2.
However, interestingly, the lowest average CPU time per data block
goes to (you guessed it!) the Alpha, which clocks in at under 2 hours
per block, even though they're only at position 11 in the list.

2.  Where's India?

We just crawled past Venezuela to reach position 51 sometime early
this morning (IST).  C'mon, another 10 people get SETI@Home running on 
their computers and we'll beat Colombia to be in the top 50!  Our
averages for time per block (~22 hours) are quite reasonable.  More
information at: http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/stats/countries.html

3.  Operating Systems

Assuming similar hardware, Linux turns up much faster than Winduhs NT,
95 or 98, doing on the average a block every 14.5 hours as compared to
NT's 21 hours, and 95's 31 hours.  NT 5 (whatever that is) tries to
come close at ~15 hours per block.  I guess we /do/ know something
they don't, right? :-) The link is at:

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/stats/oss.html

The fastest OS's on the planet (doing SETI) are Compaq/Digital Tru64
Unix (the Alpha FP operations rock!) closely followed by IRIX 6.5
(hmm, SGI rocks quite a bit too :-)

4.  How fast is the distributed computer?

AFAIK SETI@Home is the fastest supercomputer in the world currently,
clocking in at over 10 TeraFLOPS.  Anyone confirm or deny this?

SETI@Home has currently been contributed ~140,000 years of CPU time
from volunteers.

5.  Where am I?

My personal stats are at:

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgi?name=raju%40sgi.com&cmd=user_stats

I'm in the top 75 percentile right now, with 20 results submitted
(expect 2 more in a couple of hours).  Rank-wise it sucks: I'm at
position 369013 out of over 1.5 million users.  Hmm, somehow I doubt
I'll get anywhere fast rank-wise, with my three slow CPU's creaking
out results at the rate of 1 every 18 hours or so.  Now if only they
let me play with that 8-CPU Origin2000 which is lying unused in office 
:-)

Join up and put those unsused office computers to some use, folks!  It 
doesn't cost you anything, and it's our chance to show what India and
Linux can do together.

Of course, if you /do/ happen to catch the signal that those little
green dogs from Sirius have been beaming at us all these years, well,
what can I say?  You're made for life!

Regards,

-- Raju