SETI@Home group

[vee_ess]

I think graphics cards must have more to do with it than the processor itself. It would make sense too, because interpreting signals can be done easier using 3D type calculations than raw processing. That would explain why your detonator drivers made it faster, and mine is running so awefully slow.

Yeah must, but also I am running a crappy card right now, waiting a few more days to try to find a different color 9700

[Omega]

That would make sense if it was highly GPU-dependant as well (in the sense that my computer is processing slowly). I'm only running a GeForce 2 Ti at the moment, and getting significantly lower speeds than people with similar processors.

It would make sense that a fast vid card would help but in reality it don't. The SETI client is CPU/FPU intensive, not graphics intensive. In fact, you can download the non-graphical command line client and get faster results.

If your interested in the command line client you can find it on the SETI main page under the download section.

[Omega]

Do you know if SETI Spy works with the command line client?

[vee_ess]

At the beginning of each work unit, it runs really fast for me. It completed about 1.5% in about minute and a half. It was searching for pulses and triplets. At that rate, it would finish a work unit in under 2 hours, probably breaking records. But then, it slowed down dramatically to the point where its at about 4%/hour. So, I did some reasearch and now I've got it worked out (I think):

Your processor is mainly used when searching for Pulses, Triplets and Gaussians. This is because those things are calculated on 2D graphs to choose the best formulas to follow for analyzing the 3D graphs. Mathematicians have developed specific ways of finding formulas from data* and so its dependent on your processor rather than grahics card.

Your graphics card, however, is mainly used in the Fast Fourier Transform passes. What those are for is to determine whether to do further processing on the Gaussian curve fitting. This is done using 3D processing and is therefore dependent on your video card.

*And you thought there was no point to math! Look at all the ET's we've found!

[Omega]

Thanks for the insight.

I downloaded the CLI version, and gained ~10-15 MegaFLOPs/second. SETI Spy does work with this version.

Sweet Ok I have to turn on the afterburners now heheh

[Keefe]

Somehow we need to get more people to join this team!

Go recruit!!