[ale] seti at home

[Keith Hopkins]

cfowler wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> This is a Linux/Windows related post.  I wanted to post my observations
> and get verification on my findings.  I have ran seti on a few PC's the
> last couple weeks.  One is windows, the rest are Linux.  I found out
> that the Linux machines can churn out about 4 results per day and the
> Windows seems to be doing 1.  These machines are all 1GHz machines so
> I've come to the conclusion that it is just worthless to run seti on a
> box running Winbloze.
> 
> Fix:
> 
> On one Windows machine I did the following:
> 
> 1) Booted up on Linux BBC disk
> 2) Configured network card
> 3) SCP'd setiathome binary from another machine
> 4) Ran the program
> 
> I did this because I wanted to run seti on it but not in Windows.  I
> also did not want to destroy my windows partition (yet).
> 
> If this is true, why do you suppose seti runs much slower in Winbloze?
> 

Well, the obvious as Charles pointed out...Winbloze sucks.

And, since you didn't mention setting up X11 on Linux, there goes some overhead where graphics just are not needed (and for some reason, you can't seem to turn off in the Windows mode.)

Did you run a std winbloze setup?  Have you looked at the "services" win2k (or any other version) loads automatically?  lots more overhead.

IIRC, Linux BBC is a minimalist distro, so it probably isn't running a lot of stuff/daemons that you find running in a standard distro.

And, last that I recall, Linux is just a smaller, faster OS.

Oh, are you running a seti version optimized for your compiler?  What about Linux itself (not knowning BBC very well), is it optimized for your CPU (ala gentoo).

-- 
Lost in Tokyo,
   Keith



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