SETI Landmark Achieved

I registered with the SETI @ home project on the 10th August, 2000.

I was motivated by many factors. Naturally, I wanted to be the first to find ET (imagine the fortune and glory that would result)! But it wasn't just the potential for immortality that I found so appealing - the uber-geek in me wanted to contribute to a ground-breaking experiment in distributed computing. I also appreciated the free processor-intensive software that I could use for burning in new PCs and benchmarking others. Finally, I loved the "wow-factor" afforded by the software. I loved it when clients visited the office. They would invariably notice the scientific-looking SETI screen-saver and ask about it. Then, presenting myself as the great philanthropist, I could boast of my current "score" and show off my Certificate of Appreciation.

My SETI @ home stats make for pretty impressive reading:

• Completed Work Units: 10,005
• Total CPU Time: 14.018 years
• Average CPU Time per work unit: 12 hours, 16 minutes, 23.9 seconds
• Average results received per day: 34.29

My ranking: 19,548th place (out of 4,999,671 users). Apparently I have completed more work units than 99.609% of those 5 million users!

On the 10th August, 2000, my computer took just under 24-hours to complete my first work unit. Today, I have a small cluster of computers dedicated to processing SETI data. The two fastest machines take just 3-hours each to complete a unit. I am currently returning around 34 completed units per day from this cluster.

My next SETI landmark is 25,000 completed work units. This target seems impossibly distant but, considering the rate-of-change in the computer industry, I wouldn't be surprised to achieve that milestone within the next two years.

I couldn't write about SETI @ home without mentioning my team, Kustom PCs (Case Modders). The team came together in March 2003 and has made a combined contribution to the SETI project of 35,000+ units and almost 30 years of CPU time. My hat's off to you guys.