SETI@home: Flawed but fascinating software
Written: Mar 30 '00 (Updated Oct 21 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great visuals, fascinating concept, fun to track your world-wide rankings
Cons: No statistics for specific PC's
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| vicwang's Full Review: Archived Computers & Internet Reviews |
UPDATE 10/7: The Beta version of the 3.0 version of Seti@Home has just been released, and it has been significantly improved. I've addded some comments to the review where appropriate to reflect those improvements.
The Seti@home project is a "distributed computing" effort whereby you install the Seti@home software, download "work units" (small portions of the radio signals from a HUGE satellite dish) from SETI's servers, and then you (along with every other Seti@home participant in the world) help analyze the radio signals for signs of intelligent life. You can choose to have the processing take place all the time in the background (which I don't even notice on my systems since it will "free up" your CPU any time you perform a CPU-intensive task) OR you can set Seti@home as your screensaver and have it process only when the screensaver is active. Although either way the Seti client will consume some system resources, I am usually unable to detect a performance hit. Of course, any time you are about to engage in a highly CPU-intensive task (ex. playing games) turning off the client is a simple 2-click process.
What really makes Seti@home fun, besides watching the amazing visuals of the data analysis on your screen, is how they have made work-unit processing something of a "sport" through their ranking-system on the website (www.setiathome.com). With it you can see where on the world-wide rankings you stand in terms of total units processed, and you can even join teams, allowing you to chart both your ranking within your team AND your group's world-wide ranking (I'm on the UT team myself, and currently ranked 6th within the team). It REALLY gets fun if you have multiple PC's at your disposal, each of which can run the Seti@home client to crunch data simultaneously (then you'll really move up in the rankings!).
The software does have some nagging flaws though:
Although 2.0 is moderately improved, it still has difficulty connecting to the server sometimes (which it must do to send back data after you have finished processing a work unit, and then download a new one). It will re-try the connection intermittently, but if you lose your dial-up connection during the upload/download process it will not actually re-dial to connect (and you have to do it manually). (NOTE: since this review was originally written, server problems have largely been ironed-out. Connection problems still occur, although very rarely compared to before. However, I have yet to have a single connection problem with any of my dial-up systems, so I have been unable to confirm whether it will actually re-dial automatically after a failed connection).
They also have yet to incorporate a feature I've been waiting for since 1.0: statistical info for specific PC's, instead of just aggregate stats for ALL the PC's you have crunching data. In other words, you can just check your PC every so often and determine how long individual work units take, but there's no way to "benchmark" different computers and see how their performance levels compare. All you know is the statistics for your account as a whole. (NOTE: this is still unchanged with the 3.0 client).
And finally, perhaps most annoying is the fact that they COULD optimize the software significantly for systems supporting 3DNOW! and SSE (ex. Athlons and PIII's), but have chosen not to (and since this is exactly the type of computation that SIMD instructions were designed for, the performance boost could be tremendous). So why would they NOT implement optimizations that could vastly increase the speed at which data units are processed? On the website (www.setiathome) they claim that it has to do with the scientific integrity of the project, which is a pretty weak explanation to me since SIMD algorithms could easily be proven to be identical to the non-SIMD ones currently in use.
More likely is the interesting possibility that they secretly do not WANT so many work units processed, which may seem unthinkable but actually makes sense. The Seti@home project has exceeded expectations by a HUGE factor, being the most widespread distributed computing project of all time. As a result, they have been flooded with so much data that they can barely handle, much less process, all of it. For some time they were even LOSING large amounts of data since the servers were so flooded.
UPDATE: this is where the new client has the largest improvement, and that improvement is huge (which basically proves that proper utilization of 3DNow! can indeed yield major increases in performance). On my Duron running at 900 mhz, the 2.06 client used to take about 12 hours per work unit. With the 3.0 beta client, it is now almost TWICE as fast! However, it appears that they made extensive use of the "extra" 3DNow! instructions that are only in Durons and Athlons, but not the standard 3DNow! instruction set in the K6 series of CPU's. I say this because performance on my K6-2 550, which does not contain the "extra" instructions, has not been noticeably improved. I would also assume that the new client contains SSE instructions for Pentium III's, although I don't have any PIII systems available to test it on.
It's also worth mentioning that the 3.0 client actually does more analysis on each work unit than the previous one, meaning that it's actually crunching data at a rate more than twice as fast as before. To quote from the new SETI@Home FAQ:
Because the response to this project has been so much greater
than we had anticipated, we have decided to put this extra
computing power to better use and perform more extensive
analysis on the radio telescope data. We have now added pulse
and triplet detection to the analysis in our earlier versions.
Because we have been able to implement faster methods, the
new clients will do far more scientific analysis with only a
modest increase in time per work unit.
So in other words, if your goal is to crunch the most work units possible and you have an Athlon, Duron, PIII, or Celeron II system, you should download the 3.0 Beta client for a major performance increase. With any other CPU though, you'd be better off waiting until the 3.0 client is mandatory, which is still several weeks away, since work units will take longer than before.
All in all, Seti@home is an absolutely fascinating piece of software for anyone remotely interested in the possibility of alien civilizations. Who knows? Maybe one of your data units will provide the first evidence of an extraterrestrial intelligence. And even if not, at least you've got a cool screensaver.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
vicwang
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Member: Vic Wang
Location: Texas
Reviews written: 45
Trusted by: 217 members
About Me:
Systems Analyst and all-around computer guru who's always keeping up with the latest technology.
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