I've been setting my Seti@Home boxen lately to grab the Seti Enhanced workunits (5.12 and now 5.13)... and now that Crunch3r has optimized versions for Linux and Windows, I've been regaining a few (but not all) the credits/day that I used to have in the previous version of Seti. Unfortunately Alex and Rick from the Team MacNN forums haven't compiled an optimized Seti Enhanced worker for the Mac yet and that has resulted in my heaviest hitter (a quad G5 PowerMac) dropping quickly from the Top Computers list on Seti@Home's website. At its height with the last client before the transition, I was #2 out of countless thousands of computers out there and approaching #1. Unfortunately the lack of an optimized version of Seti Enhanced that supports Altivec has seriously crippled it's credit/day performance. Oh well... I'll have to just wait until the optimized versions are ready. Of course regular users of BOINC and Seti@Home won't have to worry about this since the transition from 4.18 (or 4.02 in the case of Linux) to 5.13 will be automatic. It's only when you use an optimized version of the worker files with an associated app_info.xml (this file allows you to force use of a third-party worker or one you compiled yourself) that you have to manually upgrade the Seti Workers.

Along those same lines, UC Berkeley has released the latest Boinc client 5.4.9 with a lot of improvements (some geared towards interaction with 5.12 and 5.13 Seti Enhanced). So I've also started transitioning systems over to the official 5.4.9 from TruXoft's calibrating client 5.2.13tx37. This may result in lowered claimed credits for any remaining old Seti units, but soon that won't be a problem as there will only be a few weeks left before those units will no longer be offered. Boinc upgrades are of course manual for all Seti users (unlike "regular" seti worker updates).

Just like the previous post, if you have no clue what I'm talking about, check it out here.

Tags: S@H, seti, seti@home, distributed computing, team Macnn, boinc