A Look at SETI Checker

25 April 2000 - Dan Knight

SETI Checker is a great freeware program for comparing your team (in our case, Team Mac Observer) with other teams participating in the SETI@home project. The chart displays six items of information for up to four teams, but only four of those items are really significant.

The first thing is to choose your teams. Unless someone is approaching Team Mac Observer from behind, I usually set SETI Checker to display the three teams just ahead of us in the standings. This week, that's FreeBSD, SETI@Home Poland, and SETI@Netherlands.

The first chart SETI Checker displays is the rank of the selected teams for the past 18 days, as in the example to the left. As you can see, both SETI@Netherlands and Team Mac Observer spent some time at #21 during that time, and all three teams ahead of Team Mac Observer also spent some time as high as #15 in the club team standings.

The key graph is right below the standings; it shows how many units each team has completed on a day-by-day basis. You can see where Team Mac Observer lost its top member on April 17 and lost a lot of work units. You can also see how FreeBSD and SETI@Home Poland have been in a virtual tie for weeks now - one day Poland will take the lead, another day the BSD crew moves ahead.

But what's really impressive is how the relatively new Dutch team (black) keeps climbing in the standings as more and more Dutchmen hear about it and join it.

This brings us the the next really significant chart, the one showing team membership. A quick glance lets you know that both FreeBSD and SETI@Home Poland are not gaining a lot of new members, but Team Mac Observer and SETI@Netherlands are growing rapidly. (The Dutch team is growing very rapidly and may soon have more members than Team Mac Observer.)

The final important piece of information is how fast each team is adding work units to their total. The Polish and BSD teams are steadily adding about the same number of work units each day. Team Mac Observer and SETI@Netherlands are slowly gaining in average units per day, but also gaining a lot of work units on single days as new members join our teams.

SETI Checker also graphs how many hours of CPU time each team has contributed, as well as the average time per work unit, but neither is terribly significant for projecting team standings.

As I write this, we (Team Mac Observer) are about 10,000 units behind FreeBSD and SETI@Home Poland. According to Dave's stats, these teams are averaging 437-478 units per day. It's harder to call Team Mac Observer, which Dave's mathematical model puts at 1,987 units per day, since we've gained a lot of members over the past week - and they've brought existing work units with them.

Dave does have a page reporting units on a day-by-day basis. Based on that, I'm estimating we have a base growth rate of about 800 units per day, plus whatever we gain from new members. This has us gaining on the next two teams at somewhere about 300-400 units per day, which means it could be weeks before we catch up unless still more people join Team Mac Observer.

And join they are! Over the past three weeks, we've had over 100 members join the team. In fact, we are the only Mac team climbing in the club standings, thanks to people like you joining us (hint, hint).

If you've got a relatively fast Power Mac or clone (anything over 150 MHz should do the job), consider downloading the SETI@home software and joining our team.

Recent articles about SETI@home

• Team 6100 Update, 2001.12.20. We've completed over 500 units and donated over 5 years of CPU time to SETI@home since May 2000.
• Team 6100 @300 units, SETIonMac, 2001.08.14. Team using old Power Macs has passed the 300 unit mark running SETI@home.
• SETI@home monthly update, 2001.08.01. Sad news - Team Mac Observer has fallen to #26 in the team standings.
• A look at SETI Checker, 2000.04.25. This freeware program lets you follow your favorite SETI@home teams.

Links

• SETI Station, a site for Mac SETI@home enthusiasts. Includes full instructions for speeding things up with a RAM disk.
• SETI@home home page
• Results by CPU (PowerPC is #2 behind Intel)
• Results by OS (Mac OS trails Windows)
• Results by platform (Mac #2 behind Pentium/Windows)
• Top 200 teams
• How to join Team Mac Observer

back to SETIonMac index

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