SETI Switchover

I've had one computer or another working on decoding extraterrestrial radio signals as part of the SETI@home since 23 August 1999. In that time, I processed 1929 workunits with a total CPU usage time of 5.211 years. Basically, the project uses downtime on volunteer home computers around the world to do lots of number crunching for SETI that otherwise would need to spend billions on dedicated computer facilities.


Back in March, SETI@home announced plans to switch from the classic interface to BONIC, a distributed computation manager that works with SETI@home and similar projects, but I never got around to making the change. When I returned to the office, I noticed a popup on my computer saying that SETI@home Classic was shutting down in December and that I needed to install the BONIC client if I wanted to continue with the project.

The bummer is all my old credits don't transfer to the new setup, so I'm back at 0 workunits (not that that's why I'm doing this — I just like the screensaver), but I am able to hook up with other projects, too. Now, overnight and during meetings that run way too long, my computer is happily crunching numbers for SETI@home and climateprediction.net ...

Technoarti tags: SETI@home BONIC