There was once a time when SETI@home club teams trembled at the name Team Mac Observer. Our Team was once ranked in the Top 10 of all the Club Teams, but due to a lack of pushing it on our part, we have since slipped to #27. Not too shabby, but nowhere near as good as we can do! The Mac Observeris readership has quadrupled since we started our SETI@home team, and we would like to invite you to join our team and help show the world how fast the Mac is.
SETI@home is a research project from some graduate students at UC Berkeley who are taking data from a radio telescope in Peurto Rico and searching for a signal that might be coming from another planet. The researchers made a breakthrough in what is called distributed processing and broke that data up into 350K chunks that they then give to people, us, to process. We do that with a client app called SETI@home. That app logs into the projectis servers, grabbing a new chunk of data, processing it, and sending the results back to the project when it is done.
Since first being launched in 1999, SETI@home has had 3,204,498 users join the project. Those users have contributed some 696,427.078 years of CPU time, which is the single largest processing effort ever put to use on one project. Itis a truly staggering feat. Even more staggering is that for the last 24 hours, the project has averaged 23.95 TeraFLOPs per second of floating point operations! Amazing!
The average length of time that it takes a PC/Mac/Unix box to complete a work unit is 17 hours, 35 minutes, and 59 seconds (as of this writing). That said, the Mac platform, including all of the PowerPC processors from the 601 to the latest G4 are averaging 16 hours, 36 minutes, and 08.8 seconds. Thatis not only faster than the average, itis WAY faster than the 21 hours, 31 minutes, and 51.7 seconds it takes for the Windows/Pentium platform to finish a work unit. Thatis right, this is real-word proof that the Mac is faster than Wintel, despite the MHz Myth propagated by the Intel camp! You can see for yourself at the SETI@home Stats page.
So how can you add your support to the Mac and Team Mac Observer? Join up! Itis easy and all it costs is your excess CPU time. If you are a company that joins up, weill put your logo on the Team Mac Observer home page! We track the Top 20 Most Completed Units as well as the Top 20 Fastest Members on the Team Home Page as well.
Our friends at Low End Mac have joined forces with us, and they even have a special sub-team of 6100 owners. Applelinks is also a part of our team, and you should be too. Itis fun, itis part of a great scientific experiment, and it really shows off the power of the Mac!
One more note: We have added a SETI@home forum in our forums for tweak tips, configuration help, and other SETI@home discussion.