NEWS

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

More Clients Available
There are now four more version 2.0 clients available for download.  They are:
i686-pc-linux-gnulibc1-static
i386-pc-linux-gnulibc1-static
i386-unknown-freebsd3.3
i386-unknown-freebsd4.0

Official Rollout
From the feelers I have gotten from the alt.sci.seti newsgroup, it seems the official rollout of the version 2.0 clients will occur tomorrow (Monday).  They have delayed an official announcement of the new clients because not all of their mirror sites have had the clients uploaded (ie. the v 2.0 Mac/Win98 clients)

More on v 2.0 GUI Performance
To update the performance I have been getting with the Win98 GUI client, I have finished three more work units, these three work units were downloaded from the SETI servers, the first WU did not have a gaussian (usually runs faster than ones that do have gaussians), but it ran around 9 hrs.  This was probably due to me watching some kick ass Q3 movies with Windows Media Player while running SETI, and also downloading the movies (all 200MB of em).  The other two work units did contain gaussians and finished with times of 8:20, and 8:44.  Both of these times are significantly faster than running on the old CLI client......to the tune of around 45 min to 1 hr faster than the old CLI client.

Man do I want to see how the version 2.0 CLI client runs now :)

Old client addons will not work with the version 2.0 clients.  SETIWatch and SETILog have been updated already to support the new clients.  There is a report that SETI Queue will not work with v 2.0 yet.  If you use any addons you should check their homepages to check for compatibility/updates for the version 2.0 clients.

Olli
The mad patcher Olli has reared his ugly head again.  Previously he has vowed to provide a patch for the version 2.0 clients, and it looks like he is already at work.  On the SETI newsgroup I saw a post of his today:

I'm already "debugging". Seems that SaH2.0 is doing a checksum on the whole
executable and periodically on the executable loaded into memory or more
precisely on some core-routines. But doesn't look really difficult to crack.

I would like to say that I do not or never will condone patching of any SETI clients.  I truly hope that Team Lamb Chop is now and will always be a Patch Free Team.  The main reason why version 2.0 of the SETI client was pushed out the door was because of security concerns.  Olli and his kind have put the efforts of the SETI crew into making version 2.0 into a stop-gap security release instead of letting them focus their efforts into producing a version which has a faster FFT routine, and does added science.  I really question the motivation of people who like to pull stunts like this.  It isn't a quest to produce a faster client, it isn't a quest to make things more "efficient" or just to pad stats.  In my opinion, it is only for selfish reasons just to get names in the news and show of 133+ h4Q0r sk1llz.  

With the advent of the patching of the previous clients and other cheats, I am sure that the EULA in the SETI clients was worded carefully.  Possible patches from Olli may not only result in a headache for the SETI crew, but also result in a cease and desist and lawsuit from the U Cal-Berkeley Lawyers.

Weekly and Other Stuff
FluffyPants was the only member in the top 40 that moved up a spot today.  He moved past Turbo and into the #21 spot.

On the weekly front, guru again is tops in WU production for the week.....he broke the 3000 WU barrier for the week!  In second place was Tobler Design, and svdsinner.  The top mover for the week was Joker (BTW, Thanks Gabe for the video!  If you have any xtra t-shirts could ya send one my way?  ;-).  Joker moved up 60 spots this week!  Way to Go!  Darryl A. and 77rickyli were next in line.  One word of note to the three of them.....it may be easy to move up quite a bit lower in the ranks, but it only gets tougher from here!

Over in the past week, there has been a couple of changes in the Top Teams.  With the falling out over the "house cleaning" last week, Team /. fell a spot to the #4 club team spot, with MacAddict taking their place at #3.  SETI.Germany also lost a spot because of the fallout.  They moved down to the #5 spot, with The Planetary Society taking over #4.  A move not related to the house cleaning was that Team Canada moved past Linux and into the #8 spot.

Team Lamb Chop is still entrenched in the #7 team spot overall.  The #7 is safe for a while.  Team Lamb Chop is currently widening the gap on all of the teams below us.  The closest team is MacAddict.  We have been pulling more WU/day than they have, BUT a cause for concern is that they have been adding members like crazy recently.  In the past week, they have added 70 new members.  In contrast Team Lamb Chop has only added 10 members.   Team Art Bell has shown that there is strength in numbers, any let up in Lamb Chop production may end up in MacAddict catching up to us.

On the other hand, we aren't fairing so well compared to the teams above us.  Intel is in the #6 spot, but they are cranking out about 300 WU/Day more than Team Lamb Chop.   We are gaining on a team above us......and that happens to be Microsoft in the #4 spot!  Unfortunately Microsoft is 220,000 WU ahead of us!  At the rate we are gaining it would take Team Lamb Chop till the end of August to pass them (hey ya never know!).

Last Word
The "unofficial" Team Lamb Chop thread in the Ars Technia Forums was switched to a new forum today......you can check it out here.

Interesting...
Last night I installed the new v 2.0 GUI client for Win98 and immediately did the benchmarking work unit.  My computer is a Celeron 366 @ 550MHz with 192MB RAM.  Previously with the winnt-command line client my time for the benchmarking work unit was 8:34.  I ran the new GUI client minimized, running all the time.  The time to complete the same work unit on the GUI............7:43.  That is nearly 45 minutes faster than the old version CLI.

I find this interesting because the version 2.0 GUI client shouldn't be significantly different than the version 1.06 client.  They apparently changed a graphic or two in the GUI, but nothing much.  The client itself isnt changed, it is mostly a "security" update, contrary to what some have said about v 2.0.  This client does not have a faster FFT routine, nor does it add any science, so basically it should be the same client as before.  There is a possibility that some tweaking with the graphics, and the GUI front end may have lead to a lower CPU overhead there and a faster client.  I am not sure.  I sure did not expect that the GUI would run faster than the old CLI though.  Makes me wonder how fast the winnt-command line client will run.  Guess we will have to wait and see :)

Currently I am running a normal downloaded work unit to see if it runs significantly faster than an "average" work unit I had run with the CLI.  Early reports are a bit sketchy right now......but this "normal" work unit seems to be running a tad slower than most previous ones (but, ack!....I think I just realized I may not have had the client running minimized for the past hour).

One thing to note about the new versions also, is that the different SETI addons that have been out, will most likely NOT work right now with the new version.  The new version instead of having .txt files, are now using .sah extension.  I really cant see anything that is different in the files except that they changed the file extensions.  Because of this change, most of the addons will not work.

If you want to benchmark the new clients on your machine.....go check out Rat Bastard's page to get the "benchmarking" unit, and some instructions to do the benchmark.  If you want to benchmark the GUI client, make sure you delete any previous *.sah output files, and replace the work unit with the work unit from RB's page (the client will change the work_unit.txt file to work_unit.sah).  Also make sure you set the client NOT to connect automatically.  You do not want to send the SETI guys the result of this benchmark unit to them!

Submitted For Your Approval
Four new version 2.0 clients hit the shelves today....as of this writing it hasnt been updated on the downloads page but these are available.  The first two are the Win9x GUI client and the Mac GUI client the other two are text clients.......no CLI out yet :(

Click on the name to download:

setiathome_win_2_0
setiathome_mac_2_0
setiathome-2.0.i386-pc-linux-gnu-gnulibc2.1
setiathome-2.0.i386-sequent-sysv4

Team Changes
There was a bit of movement in the top 40 today.  C. Eric Smith moves up a notch, passing Panders for #8.  svdsinner also moved up a notch past AutoLign for #11.  FluffyPants, The Weeblows, and Vasp all move up one notch to #22, #27 and #37 respectively.

v 2.0 Update
The download links for the several version 2.0 clients disappeared yesterday, but are back up now.  You can find them back on the text client download page.  No new v 2.0 clients showed up today either.

Downage Time
The SETI servers went down again today for a while.  Nothing to do with their hardware, but they were taken off-line for preventative reasons.  Here is the blurb from the SETI page:

January 21, 2000
We arrived this morning to find that the astrobiology lab next to the server closet had sprung a water leak and that there was standing water under all of our servers! Luckily nothing was damaged, but we brought everything down until the leak was under control. Our apologies to those participants who we cut off abruptly. All should be OK now.

Chow Time!
Again today, there was only one move going on in the top 40.  This happened to come from svdsinner.  He moved up another spot, passing romkey and now sits at the #12 spot.  

Changes....
The SETI@Home main page looks like it has changed a bit.  There is a new look logo up (which I personally don't like that much).  Also I noticed on the download page that the version 2.0 clients which were up yesterday, are not there now.  There are not any links to them on the page, but they are still on the ftp server.  Take a look there and you can still download them if you wanna.  There aren't any new 2.0 versions up on the ftp server though. 

NEW!
Team Lamb Chop has a new member, and they sure made a splash with their arrival.  UltraMaroon debuts today with 4179 WUs and ranks in at #10.  Most everyone else took a step down with that arrival!.  

There was only one member who moved up in the top 40 today.  That happened to be Tobler Design.  They move up 2 spots to the #16 spot.

Breaking News:
I thought there would have been a general announcement and things done all at once, but again I was wrong.  It appears that version 2.0 clients are slowly leaking out from the SETI@ Home offices.  As of right now there are the following version 2.0 clients available!

setiathome-2.0.i686-pc-linux-gnu-gnulibc2.1
setiathome-2.0.alpha-dec-osf3.0
setiathome-2.0.i386-pc-sco3.2v5.0.x
setiathome-2.0.i386-pc-sysv4.2uw2.1
setiathome-2.0.i386-sco-sysv5.unixware7
setiathome-2.0.sparc-sun-solaris2.6

Linux gurus go for it!
Download the new clients here.

Oops...
I made a little mistake in yesterday's update.  It appears that The Planetary Society did not have a member that got the axe.  I messed up with compiling the stats.  What actually happened was that SETI.Germany took a bit more hit than I thought and actually dropped a spot behind The Planetary Society down to the club team #6 spot.  The updated graph shows the correct standings for the teams.  

There also appears to be some corrections to the fallout from a couple of days ago.  The PowerBook totals look like they are back to their "pre-axe" level.  Someone may have said all the right things and were reinstated :-).  Also SETI.Germany recovered some of their loss.  I am not sure but from looking at their team members and totals, originally their top member was axed.....but it looks like he is back, but they took a significant number of work units from his account.  This resulted in today's gain for them.

Team Moves
Tobler Design keeps on hopping up the ranks.  Over the past 3 days they have moved up 7 spots and now sit at #18.  In other team movement svdsinner moves up another spot passing mjdewitt for #12.  Dan Dan The Linux Man moves up to #16.  R. Marvin moved up one to #21.  FluffyPants  up one and is now #22.  Dr. Xing up 1 to #25, Vulture up 2 to #28.  Grimas is back and moved up one spot to #31 and finally  mzantrope moved up one to #38.

Fallout...
Well I posted the update and you can check the club team standings to see the fallout of the "house cleaning" from yesterday.  There were several of the top team which were affected.  Slashdot was hit the hardest, but there were also members of SETI.Germany, The Planetary Society, and PowerBook, which had "suspected cheaters".  I think that there were at least 20 members in the top 360 users overall which lost their accounts and work units.  I estimate that to be *at least* 200,000 Work Units that went *poof*, probably more.  It appears that Team Lamb Chop didn't have any members which got axed.  (no one in the top 200 for sure).  The team did lose one member in the member totals from yesterday to today, but I am not sure if that person just left the team, or got canned for cheating.

Because of the drastic changes in work units for several teams, the chart for a team overtaking another was amended.  There is a big ? for the teams that lost members.  It may take a week till I can get a good estimate on their post axe work unit rate to be able to update for them.

Safe at #2!!!!!!
What a coincidence eh?
Well, things have change kind of drastically since I updated yesterday.  The #2 club team spot is safe!  

I had updated the page before dinner, and I wandered back to take a look at a couple of things about Team /. and I noticed something quite interesting.  I wanted to go back and check out VTEC a little bit more since he should have been in the overall top 20 at least.  I first checked the Team /. page and he was GONE! *poof* zip, zilch, gone.  I was thinking.......did he read the stats page here?  Feel sorry for us and leave /.?  If he just left the team he should still be in the overall top 1000.  I checked the top 1000 page on the Berkeley servers and he was gone from there also with 110,000 WUs he should have been #9 overall).  Man what happened?  110,000 Work Units just *disappeared*

I then remembered a thread on the SETI newsgroup about "suspected cheats".  I hopped on usenet to read the thread (I hadn't earlier).  Lo and Behold Eric Korpela had just made a post which can explain what happened:

Kevin W. Parker wrote:
>I just moved up nearly twenty spots in the time it took me to fix and eat
>dinner (from about 380th to 360th). Is this more cheaters being booted?
>Can anyone definitively say what's going on?

You can tell how I spent my day off.  There's no way to tell at this point
which are real cheaters and which have been caught by a nasty bug that
occasionally pops up.  They've all gotten email from me requesting certain information....

Eric

Well it looks like Eric was "taking out the trash" earlier and ol' VTEC got sucked up in the vacuum.  What does this mean to Team Lamb Chop?  Well...because VTEC was booted, he lost those 110,000 WUs, and also /. lost 110,000 work units from their team total.  This was a serious enuff hit for them, and this throws /. down a notch behind the MacAddict team to the #4 team overall.....The #2 spot for Team Lamb Chop is now safe.

Back For a Bit
I am back for a big update today.  Sorry for the absence, but I was starting to get a bit burned out from updating the page here.  Depending on the day it may take me 1-3 hours to get all the stats and stuff updated, and then have to figure out something interesting to say here on the front page :-).  I may not be updating the news here on the front page every day, but I do update the stats on the pages here every day.

#3 Soon...
Team Lamb Chop will most likely drop to the #3 club team spot in the next few days.  Team /. has narrowed our lead over them to 7500 work units.  They have been gaining about 2000 WU per day, so our lead may only last till Wednesday and then we should drop down to the #3 spot.  How is /. doing it?  It appears that the majority of the work units they are posting per day are due to one person(s).  Taking a look at their production over a period of several hours shows that one of their members VTEC is crunching an insane amount of work units per day.  Over a period over several hours the entire team had posted 2442 WUs, over that same period of time VTEC had posted 2013 of those WU by himself.  Over the period I had looked VTEC accounted for 82% of their team work units.  In the overall team totals for /. VTEC accounts for 31% of their 360,000 WUs.

News from the SETI@Home Offices
Actually there hasn't been anything too much coming from the Berkeley guys in the past week or so.  There was quite a hubbub on the SETI newsgroups about the Wired article about the Version 2.0 release.  Many of the people on the newsgroups took the Wired article as Gospel, even though the SETI staff members on the group stated otherwise.  As I suspected earlier, the v 2.0 client has not come out within a week that they quoted in the article.  People have been whining about the new client supposedly being "25% slower than the previous version".  But again Eric K. tried to squash the misinformation:

Actually, David may have overestimated on the 25% slower number.  My goal
is to have run times as close to identical as possible.  Of course the
ratio will vary from processor to processor, but it should be fairly close
to an even trade.

Eric

One thing to note also is that the answer referred to the upcoming client including the new science.  I have still yet to hear if the new science is supposed to be included in the v 2.0 patch.  AFAIK, the new science will not be in the v 2.0 client, but will be released in the v 3.0 client.

Over the past week there were several outages in the data servers over at the Berkeley offices.  Again this was traced back to a faulty RAID card in their servers.  It was replaced again, but they are not sure if this will solve all the problems with the database servers.

Team Stuff
Vomesh keeps moving up the ranks, over the past couple of days he has moved up 2 spots and is now sitting at the team #6 spot overall.  svdsinner move up one spot the unlucky #13....hopefully he can crank out another spot soon to get outta there!  Turbo has moved up 2 to #19, R. Marvin is up one to #21, The Weeblows is up 1 to #28, Vulture is up 2 to #30.  Darkmage moved up 1 to #34, and Vasp moved into the top 40 by scooting up 3 places to #37.

The weekly page has been updated, topping the charts in top 200 movement are the GNS Tek doodz.  They moved up 33 spots and are sitting at #147.  They were followed in the movement front by PGS and Warthog.  Tops in Work Units this week was again guru, cranking out over 3000 WUs this week.  2nd and 3rd were Tobler Design, followed by svdsinner.

Over the past several weeks you may have noticed that there are several members in the top 200 who have not produced any work units.  I have counted over 20 members who havent posted any work units during this time.  This is over 10% of the top 200.  Their reasons may vary on why they havent been cranking (switching to RC5, lost access to computers, etc).  Here is a chart of those members, their ranking and the date of their last work unit recorded.

Mad Props Time!
Here are the top 200 members who passed some milestones in the past week or so.  I also put in the members who are new in the top 200.  A special welcome goes out to Joker.  He is a friend that was introduced to the team through the page here.  He is a flight simulation fanatic who works currently for Microprose.  Unfortunately his stint there is coming to an end.  He was one of those who was let go by Hasbro in their pre-Christmas hacking of jobs.  He is cranking out some work units at Hasbro's expense at the moment, but that soon will come to an end.

New #1!
guru is back on top.....today he passes up davycroc for the top place on Team Lamb Chop.  Congrats!

There has been quite a bit of movement over the past couple of days within the team....I will try to give a synopsis of the movement.  leech has finally passed Panders and is now the #6 team member.  C. Eric Smith moved up a total of 3 spots to #9.  svdsinner jumped up 2 spots to #14.  Fluffypants moved up a notch to #23.  The big mover for the past couple of weeks has been Tobler Design.  They have rocketed up from nowhere, moving up 19 spots in the past 5 days and now is #25....but it just gets tougher to move up from there!

Sorry
I want to apologize for the lack of news updates today and most likely for the next couple of days.  I am pretty busy with stuff at home, plus hockey and plus messing around with Janes F/A-18 :-).  If there is anything really important or earth shattering I WILL post it here though....

One thing of note....is that all the Club Team stats seems to be screwed up.  WUs done by individuals are not being updated into the team totals.  Actually out team totals have gone down, most likely because we lost a member yesterday.  Over the past two days if there has been any change in the totals of a team, it is most likely due to a member joining/leaving a team.  I am not sure what is up....but hopefully it will get straightened out sometime soon.

- News Archives