Technical News and SETI@home daily stats for 29.11.2006.

[Rattledagger]

November 29, 2006 - 19:00 UTC
Last night we had a blip of an outage due to our data download server losing its mount of the file server holding the workunits. This was strictly a random failure, and it worked itself out on its own. We saw similar behavior back when we had a heavier load on the entire system. We released the enhanced client which greatly reduced the rate of workunit/result exchange and therefore reduced the occurrence of these load-related problems. Thanks to Moore's Law and an ever-increasing user base, we'll need to address this issue sooner than later.

The other lingering, randomly-occurring problem has to do with "rough periods" accessing the database (see eariler tech news items for details). Basically, what's going on is this: every 24 hours or so a process dumps all useful user/host/team stats to XML files which other sites can upload and generate leader boards, graphs, etc. These tables have continually grown in size, and apparently when this process runs they can knock the result table out of memory. The feeder process, which keeps a healthy queue of available work to send out to users, needs the result table in memory or else a sub-second query to select more work becomes a multi-minute query to read the whole result table back into memory from disk. We're looking into making these queries more efficient.

We're also looking at setting up a new BOINC database server (remember that the BOINC database is separate for the SETI@home-specific science database which already is on a new server and working well). Recently Intel donated several pieces of hardware to us, including a quad dual-core Xeon processor system (i.e. 8 3GHz processors total). We're currently working out some system quirks, but when we begin trusting it we'll make this our master BOINC database server, and the current one will be a replica. This will provide an immediate backup if needed, and remove the necessity for the weekly outages. More to come on that. Another recently Intel system has already been set up and is being used as a backend science CPU server (and to read new data from hard drives sent up from Arecibo).

The last of the known never-touched classic data tapes has been read last week and is in the splitter queue. Next we will start reading tapes that have gone through the pipeline in some form or another, but for some reason never made it into our master database. Possible reasons include: bad data (but hopefully not), a tape drive failure that caused the tapes to remain unread (surprisingly more common than you'd think), poor initial analysis or database corruption leading to failure during redundancy checking. So don't be upset when tapes from the late 90's appear on the queue. Data from 1998 is worth the same as data taken in 2006. The ETs we are looking for come from light years away. A few years won't make any difference when looking for signals consistently repeating over time.

#____Total Work Done____Todays WD_____AWD________overtake_______Team-name
01______171.174.590______683.083______317.981______impossible______SETI.Germany
02______124.170.277______1.324.973______646.034______impossible______SETI.USA
03_______87.341.119______110.337_______56.646______impossible______BroadbandReports.com Team Starfire
04_______66.075.425______178.131_______87.857______impossible______Czech National Team
05_______63.724.211______244.871______122.368______impossible______L'Alliance Francophone
06_______59.196.125______235.513______114.641______impossible______BOINC Synergy
07_______55.366.590______128.403_______66.572______impossible______SETI@Netherlands
08_______44.261.045______-18.428_______-5.541______7.988 days______OcUK - Overclockers UK
09_______34.280.918_______-1.887_______-3.041_____11.273 days______BOINC.Italy
10_______26.901.118______206.763______105.226______impossible______The Knights Who Say Ni!
11_______23.893.897_______94.403_______44.878______impossible______Overclockers.com
12_______18.127.919_______80.423_______42.195______impossible______Team 2ch
13_______17.562.861______143.804_______64.344______impossible______Team Art Bell
14_______14.661.018_______83.345_______39.195______impossible______The Planetary Society
15_______11.588.859_______73.599_______30.968______impossible______Ars Technica
16________4.784.343______-63.497______-26.865________178 days______Universe Examiners
17_______38.028.595______150.975_______73.451______notanoption_____TeAm AnandTech
18_________-514.628______-38.411______-17.882______impossible______Phoenix Rising
19_______-1.032.428______135.646_______73.888_________14 days______Team MacNN
20_______-3.551.069_____-110.157______-52.064______impossible______Planet 3DNow!
21_______-6.307.095______-83.658______-35.363______impossible______PC Perspective Killer Frogs
22_______-7.071.308______-80.543______-38.042______impossible______2CPU.com
23_______-7.818.340______-24.302______-11.075______impossible______Hewlett-Packard
24_______-8.233.238______-17.915_______-5.997______impossible______Amateur Radio Operators
25_______-9.568.717_______24.177________7.687______1.245 days______SETI@Taiwan
26______-10.134.702_____-108.267______-50.702______impossible______Picard
27______-10.539.861______-21.040______-10.154______impossible______Canada
28______-12.145.344______-18.877______-10.948______impossible______SETI@China
29______-12.357.692______-82.536______-40.260______impossible______BOINC@Denmark
30______-12.393.069______-66.005______-33.216______impossible______Portugal@Home
31______-12.425.180______-98.042______-45.491______impossible______LittleWhiteDog
32______-13.341.168______-36.709______-17.872______impossible______Team NIPPON
33______-14.546.817______-43.771______-20.195______impossible______BOINC SETI@home RUSSIA
34______-14.774.034______-58.661______-22.461______impossible______Dutch Power Cows
35______-15.230.591________7.724_________-392______impossible______Team MacAddict
36______-16.767.443______-90.566______-44.122______impossible______Team EDGE
37______-17.630.785______-15.678______-11.673______impossible______Hungary
38______-18.724.758______-62.774______-29.707______impossible______SETI@klamm.de
39______-19.737.806______-61.424______-33.485______impossible______HispaSeti&BOINC
40______-20.058.236______-81.358______-35.986______impossible______SETI Sverige [Sweden]
41______-20.630.648______-86.726______-44.462______impossible______The Final Front Ear
42______-20.775.442______-46.281______-23.478______impossible______UK BOINC Team
43______-20.906.781______-58.350______-30.529______impossible______U.S.Air Force
44______-21.374.466_____-118.281______-57.074______impossible______US-Distributed
45______-21.411.777______-80.134______-38.885______impossible______World Wide S.E.T.I.
46______-21.572.084______-90.701______-44.732______impossible______BOINC UK
47______-21.583.932_____-103.032______-43.828______impossible______Overclockers Australia
48______-21.595.486______-19.887______-26.522______impossible______BOINC@AUSTRALIA
49______-21.713.561______-69.515______-33.220______impossible______SETI.hr
50______-22.039.074______-91.655______-45.497______impossible______forum.hwsw.hu
53______-22.993.102______128.345_______70.585________326 days______Team Starfire World BOINC

Appart for Anandtech's stats, it shows how much more/less than Anandtech.
Also shows based on Average Work Done how many days for Anandtech to overtake the team, or be overtaken by a team behind...

 

[Zim Hosein]

Thanks for the tech update and SETI@home daily stats Rattledagger :beer:

 

[panhead49]

thanks RD!!

 

[Assimilator1]

Thanks for the info & stats RD

Nice rig Intel donated!