SETI@Home and BOINC

So I got an email from SETI@Home the other day, asking me why I haven’t returned a work unit in years.

Way back when the SETI@Home program switched to the new BOINC client, I quit running it. I didn’t like it at all. I could no longer let it run in the background without slowing down my computer, the new 3D graphics felt superfluous and actually made things harder to read, for me, and I encountered a lot of errors with the new program.

It’s been about 3 years now. Has it gotten better? Will it be worth it to finally go back to SET@Home? Will it make my computer think extra hard when it comes on, or is it back to the pre-BOINC days of turning on and off quickly and painlessly? Are the graphics back to being simple and readily understandable? Can I let it run in the background full-time without noticeably affecting the performance of my computer?

I’d love to have something more interesting than “flying stars” as my screen saver again, and I do miss the old SETI@Home. So, those of you still running it: what are your opinions? Should I go for it again?

Like you, I stopped using SETI when they switched to BOINC. However a few months ago I thought I’d give it a try again, and I’m glad I did. Although the graphics are still 3D, it seems that the issues that truly bugged me back then are gone, and I haven’t had any problems this time around. Well, I did have one problem: It seems by default, the new client defaults to running 100% of the time in the background…I could notice a slowdown in the repeat rate while typing. However, there is a configuration screen that let’s you change it…i set it to only run when the computer has been idle for 15 minutes, or whenever the screensaver kicks in.

I have both the SETI@Home and Einstein@Home projects configured, but there are many more to choose from.

The best part about running it now is that the computer I’m using is a LOT faster than the computer I used then, so it’s just churning out work units left and right.

Go ahead, give it a try!

Folding@home studies protein folding, and is probably a lot more useful that SETI@home.

There’s lots of projects availble via BOINC, I’m running SETI on one of my boxes and Leiden Classical on the other. I had some problems with the Leiden one at first, but after changing a couple of settings, things cleared up nicely, and I don’t notice when/if it runs.

I also came in to mention Folding@home. We do it on the PlayStation3. The process seems especially well suited to game computers, as makes it good use of the graphic capacities thereof.
Folding@Home has a really nice screensaver of the moving proteins set against a globe with lights where there are cities and bigger lights where a computer is actually participating in the folding program. We shut it off when we are playing a game, though.

I had no idea that you could run BOINC projects on the PS3. That is very cool!

Actually in the case of the Folding@Home project, the contribution through the PS3 has grown to about 80% of the whole project’s contribution, with well over 1 Petaflop worth of computing power and growing. Quite impressive! And the client looks real nice too.

(this addition was written by Maastricht somewhat nerdier half)

Been running SETI and Einstein via BOINC for about a year and a half now. Seems to work just fine; I can’t say I’ve ever noticed any performance issues due to it. In fact, a work unit on SETI seems to run in less than half the time now, compared to the original program.