Why are we requiring you to upgrade to SETI@home 3.03?
Before answering this question, we want to say thank you to our users (over a million of you!). You have made history with this, the largest distributed computing project ever, with more processing power than any supercomputer ever built.
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.
We understand that during the transition, there will be a heavy load on our servers for downloading the new software. Please be patient and keep trying; the quality of the science will greatly benefit from the upgrade.
The SETI@home project analyzes data taken from a radio telescope in South America by distributiong it to some 2.5 million users who donate excess CPU time. If you need more information on the project, read all about it. The Mac platform is the #2 platform behind the Windows platform and boasts significantly faster performance than our Wintel brethren.
The Mac Observer sponsors a SETI@home team called Team Mac Observer that has been in the Top 20 Club Teams for most of the last year. You can help show the world how fast the Mac is by joining Team Mac Observer! We have the easy instructions for you in our Team pages. You can download the new client from the SETI@home Web site. There are separate sites for Mac, Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.