NEWS

Hardware freaks trying to make some sense out of a bunch of numbers

Flush..................
Do you hear that sound? It is the sound of the SETI servers flushing their backlog of reported work units. It looks like that ever team was effected by this flushing. Team Lamb Chop had a boost of over 9000 WUs because of this. Remember, this boost is because the SETI servers usually do not report the correct amount of team work units during the daily team updates. If a team has more than 100 members on the team, the work units from members who are not in the "top 100" (for the most part) arent included in the team totals during that day's update. It sometimes takes 10 days to a week for the servers to "flush" these completed work units into the team totals. Today's update included one of those "flushings".

LInux makes its move
Linux made a big move yesterday, they added a couple of members and they brought along a huge amount of work units with them. They jumped a whopping 18,000+ WUs yesterday. That jump for them didnt let them move up a notch in the standings, but it did bring them a heck of alot closer to the PowerBook, Planetary Society, and SETI.Germany teams. On a side note....of the top 12 Club teams, Linux has the highest Work Unit/Member ratio....of 338 WU/Member. Even though Team Lamb Chop cranks out a lot of work units we have a middle of the road ratio of 111 WU/Member (7th out of the top 12 club teams).

Oh Canada!
Our neighbors to the North, Team Canada, has moved up a notch in the rankings, passing up OS/2 Warp for the #9 spot for Club Teams.

Do We Have a Winner?
For the past week, Uncomm0n and Dr. Xing has been having a heated battle between each other. They were neck and neck and going back and forth for a couple of days. It appears though that Uncomm0n may have won this battle. He seems to be pulling away from Dr. Xing a bit and is in command of the #16 spot. During this battle, both Uncomm0n and Dr. Xing has passed up Ars guru Caesar. Caesar now drops back down to #18.

Up and Coming.
The alter ego of Rat Bastard....Guidant is poised to take on the top 20 again. Guidant has passed his alter ego, and now is at #23 and probably before the end of the weekend shall be in the top 20. Other top 100 memebers to watch include: R. Marvin at #23...Uncle Timbo at #46....The Weeblows at #53...The Phrog at #64...and finally Ben Cornett at #79

In the Top Ranks...
Even though they may be tops in Team Lamb Chop......they also are in the "3133+" ranks of all of the SETI@Home Users. The top three Team Lamb Chop members are also in the top 1000 overall. The SouthPark Admin crew is ranking in at #169 overall. Panders is at #436.....and finally Gonzo is at #648. If you want to get into the top 1000......the current requirement is 2522 Work Units.....hrmmmmm I only have 2200 WUs to go!

Yea....If I Could Afford It...
admit it....you want one too....

Update Note
For the past couple of days, the updates on the Club Teams stats page are being done at around 02:00 UTC. The update for "Tuesday" was at 02:40 UTC. Well that turns out to be something like 9pm EST on Monday for me. To get the stats sort in sync with the updates the SETI guys are doing, today's update is acutally with that data from around 9pm EST yesterday (get it?). That is the reason why the numbers for the teams seem kind of small today. Things should be back on track (sort of) tomorrow. One word of note though is that the individual Team Lamb Chop stats/rankings are "more up to date" with the numbers accurate to around 7:30pm EST today (Tuesday).

More New Members
We added another 37 members over the past day.....the most notable is Dan Dan the LInux Man. He joins the team with 1087 WUs and that puts him in the #14 spot. Other movement in the top 20 are as follows: C. Eric Smith pulls ahead of Whiner just a tad today...and is in #11 by hisself. Uncomm0n though passed up Dr. Xing and is now at #17.......also FluffyPants slips by Clayton Olley and is now at #19.

Now Thats More Like It
Thanks to alittle p1mping from Gonzo on the Ars Technica main page, Team Lamb Chop has added 56 new members from yesterday's update. The most notable additions are Clayton Olley (986 WU) and Gripp (438 WU). Clayton Olley immediately hops into the Lamb Chop top 20....while Gripp comes in at #79. A hearty welcome aboard to all the new members.....you can drop into the team "unofficial" thread and say hi......and now it is time to kick some Mac and /. ass!

Its a dead heat! At the time of this update Whiner and C. Eric Smith are both tied for the #11 spot. Lets see who can pull ahead for the next update! Uncomm0n passed Beryllium yesterday for the #17 spot......but he is looking for more since only 6 WUs seperate him from Dr. Xing.

Forgot to Mention
Sun was helped out quite a bit last week by the addition of former Team Lamb Chop members guru and davycroc. They retook the #2 overall position from Compaq. With MacAddict's move the past couple of days, they are now the #7 team overall. Team Lamb Chop is still holding steady at #9.

Rumblings on alt.sci.seti
There has been an ongoing "discussion" on the alt.sci.seti newsgroup (I really havent read that much of it). There is this guy who posts by the name "olli" who supposedly has come out with a "plug-in patch" which supposedly speeds up the fast fourier transformation routine in the SETI client. The problem with this patch is that it is an unauthorized patch. What i have found interesting in the discussion is the question of actually needing or not needing a faster client for the SETI project.

Because of the way the project is set up it leads to competition among different teams. Because of this competition, many of the members will try to find ways to run the SETI clients faster (including us). Unfortunately there are people out there who want to "show off" their "talents" and hack the client to make it run faster. The problem with this is that it may or may not lead to accurate results from the client. The only way to make sure that these programs run correctly is to submit them to the Berkeley SETI guys and they check them out and may release them through "official" channels. The problem with this is that many people dont even check with the Berkeley guys and run these "optimized" clients anyways. From what i have read in the newsgroups and other channels, there have been several different hacks out there (probably more)......some guy from Microsoft was caught with one and his stats were wiped out.....there apparently was another that was actually giving wrong results....and there is finally this one from this "olli" guy.

"Olli" has had blatant disregard to what the Berkeley SETI guys have asked, and has kept trying to distrubute this patch. This is one of the reasons why the Berkeley guys are trying to get a version 2.0 of the client out as soon as they can. This client will be more secure, and will help defeat all of the unauthorized patches/clients floating around.

Another interesting this is that the SETI guys dont necessarily want a faster client right now. Why would I say that? You have to remember with the servers and such over at the Berkeley offices they dont need a faster client. Right now I believe that each work units is processed an average of 2 times. The servers at Berkeley do alot of different things, they help split the raw signals from the telescope into work units, they also help keep track of individual/team stats and they also are used to upload results and download new work units. If the clients were significantly sped up, then there would be more need for the servers to download workunits and upload results....giving less time to split signals.....also alot of that CPU time gets wasted doing work that really isnt needed......that average work unit may get processed say 3 times instead of 2. I guess that is all part of the problems with their success.....

OK i guess that is the end of my editorial :-)

Hrmmmm......
There is a new #2 Club Team.....Team MacAddict. They passed up Team /. sometime late Friday. The jump is quite a jump also. Over the past 3 days MacAddict has added 61 new members and has processed around 15,000 WUs. My only question is where did the 15,000 WUs come from? Did those 60 new memebers each bring along with them 200+ work units? Did the SETI servers flush their backlog for MacAddict only? Did members of the team decide to reinstall the buggy Mac client which "processed" Work units in like 2 min? Something kind of smells fishy......and it aint the Miami Dolphins.

.....But again I may be wrong.

Version 2.0 News this week?
I read on over at the alt.sci.seti newsgroup a couple of days ago that there should be some type of update on the v2.0 SETI client sometime this week...either on the SETI@Home Berkeley website or on the newsgroup. I shall let ya know what i find out.

Team Lamb Chop News
The numbers posted by MacAddict over the past couple of days has put them quite out of the reach of us. Unless we get a mass influx of members in the upcoming weeks, our chance of overtaking them may drop to nil. On the other hand.....we are still gaining on Team /.....the problem is that it is a very slow gain.

romkey has slipped passed ojohnson and now is sitting pretty at #8...cthulhu is up next for him! Dr. Xing moves past Beryllium for the #16 spot......he is going to shoot for Caesar and Grimas, who are in a heated battle themselves.

IM GOING GONZO FOR WORK UNITS!.......Ars stud Gonzo leads the list this week of WUs processed.....he was followed by leech, SouthPark, and romkey. The top mover this week turns out to be The Weeblows.....he passed up 21 others......he was followed by The Phrog who leapt up 19 spots.

Know your BIOS
Unless you have built your own system, or changed the hard drive on your system...you may never have had to acces your BIOS settings. Even though many people have not taken a look at your BIOS, they may have a big impact on how the SETI client will perform on your machine. Rat Bastard's Benchmarking Page has started to show that some of these settings *are* very important and have a big influence on client performance. Last night I got direct evidence of such influence.....by changing some of my BIOS settings to what was recommended on the benchmarking page, i shaved 30 minutes off of my benchmark time. Every minute counts....and as an added bonus, tweaking your BIOS settings may just improve your overall computer's perfomance. If you have the confidence to mess with your BIOS, then head on over to the Benchmarking Page to find out how to improve things.

Dog at my Fiber Optic Cable...er...I mean Homework
You may have noticed that the SETI servers may have been down over the past couple of days.....well we have a reason from the Berkeley Home Office:

November 5, 1999
Up until today, we regenerated some of the stats pages every hour. This includes the totals, top 1000 users, cpu types, operating systems, platforms, countries, and venue pages. However, the database has gotten sufficiently large that it now takes over two hours to regenerate these pages, causing multiple stats-page-processes to start before others are finished. So now we're on a four hour schedule.

November 4, 1999
A fiber between campus and the Space Lab broke around 10:00am PST this morning. Campus fixed it within three hours. During this time, both our web server and data server were unreachable outside the lab.

We've cleaned up the top gaussians page a bit. The bulk of the top gaussians were due to a single user who apparently has a MIPS machine with a faulty floating point processor. (I don't know of any properly functioning floating point processor that can square a real number and get a negative result). The page now ignores results with that user/platform combination. Other MIPS results should not be affected.

November 2, 1999
Yesterday an unnamed film crew plugged a gigawatt of lighting equipment into one of our uninterruptable power supplies. Not unexpectedly, it was interrupted, temporarily bringing down the user database machine. At about the same time on the science database machine one of the disks failed. Thanks to RAID, the hot swap disk kicked in. Unfortunately the hot swap also failed, revealing a more serious problem. It didn't automatically kick over to the second hot swap. Today we rebooted the science database machine which brought the second hot swap online. The RAID controller worked as advertised and the science database kept operating with just a momentary lapse and no data loss.

In addition to the server outages, the Club Stats page hasnt been updated regularly over the past couple of days. This only makes my job keeping stats here a bit tougher for me :-(. I personally hope that they get this straightened out soon.....whoops just saw this on their page: "Personal stats are updated immediately. The pages below are regenerated, at best, every four hours. And due to a currently overloaded server, processing group/domain stats sometimes takes days." BLAH. This basically means that the Club Team stats i hvae been keeping may not be current......aaaaah the pitfalls of trying to make daily stats updates!

Did You Know?

• Team Lamb Chop has 1377 Members. That is about 1/300th of the active membes....and is about 1/1000th of the total members.

• Over my last 70 or so WUs processed.....37% of those WUs did not contain any gaussians.

• On average WUs that did not contain gaussians were processed 47 min faster than WUs that contained at least 1 gaussian.

• My new favorite word is "chuzzlenut"

New #2 SOON?
Team MacAddict added a copule of new members today, and it seems that they brought along with them quite a few WUs. This jump today put them in the passing lane, and they should pass Team /. most likely tomorrow for the #2 Club Team spot.

Team Lamb Chop News
If you mijssed it...mjdewitt passed up cthulhu for the team #6 spot. Also there is a couple of hot and heavy races in the top 20. C. Eric Smith and Whiner are neck and neck fighting it out for the #11 spot. Also further down, there is a logjam at spots #14-20. All six of them are looking quite parallel.....and only 122 WUs seperate the lot of them!

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