mitrichr & Ingleside... thanks for the info and your point of view. I'm learning things about SETI@Home that I didn't know.

Thanks,
CJSL

hahaha... you ain't woofin...

CJSL

While I’m not about to search for aliens, it’s important to reflect on what has come from SETI when formulating an opinion. To SETI, the development of Boinc and furthering of DC would have merely been tools for ‘spotting Spock’, and they could have used others or kept these tools private. These tools are now key to every other Boinc project, and much of the DC knowledge base stems from SETI. So while we can poke fun at the ‘alien spotters’, and I do, we should respect these secondary accomplishments and if anyone delves past the title they will see general astronomical research.
Even when searching for something that may not exist, whether it’s aliens or gravitational waves, you still need to develop and further science. It’s often the case that techniques and technologies developed in one field lead to discoveries in other fields.
It’s unfortunate that there is more arguing, bickering and slating among scientists than communication of observations, findings and discoveries. To a large extent crunchers help break down this barrier, by passing on knowledge gained from one project to another. So for example we know that OpenCL projects tend to require greater access to resources, which is controlled by the CPU, so leaving more CPU threads free expedites the OpenCL on GPU task (might be of interest here at some stage). CUDA, not so much! We know that some drivers are better than others, some operating systems are faster, some CPU's, GPU's, hard drives, what settings more optimal... If every project had to develop a Boinc-like client, server, site, and individually learn about crunching there would not be too many DC projects. Each new project is accelerated by the Boinc package, and by the crunchers that contribute knowledge, time and resources. So while SETI hasn’t and may never achieve it’s original objective, other projects have reaped the rewards of their labour. All projects that use Boinc owe their success, at least to some extent, to those that developed Boinc, including those crunchers that contributed to the knowledge pool. So, to those that crunch for other projects and pass on what they learn, thanks. Hopefully this will continue.

You may be misinterpreting some of this data. I joined SETI in 2001, long before WCG started. According to BOINC I have contributed 403,558,314 Credits in total to Collatz, GPUGRID, Milkyway, SETI and WCG. Of that only 55,045,859 is for WCG, BUT 100% of my CPU contribution is to WCG. All of the other credits is for GPU processing, and the GPUs donated to SETI are my oldest video cards and will not work an any of the other GPU projects.

I agree that the value of WCG to mankind is significantly more important than SETI, and that is why I dedicate all of my CPU to WCG. There may be others like me that are just doing GPU processing on SETI, because WCG does not support GPU processing.

Once WCG starts supporting GPU, I will convert all of my resources to WCG and I expect my contribution to WCG to SIGNIFICANTLY increase! :)

My observation to this is that pretty much everybody seems to think they can discuss any non WCG related grid project at WCG, but the reverse is an apparent No-No. Maybe that's one of the reasons we have a substantial greater retention. Not the biggest, but definitely the BEST with by far the greatest continuity, IMNSHO.

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