[ale] seti at home

[Jeff Hubbs]

I have run over 5200 SAH work units on both Windows and Linux machines
and I can tell you that the speed difference you're seeing is not due to
merely the difference between Linux and Windows.

First, let's make sure we're comparing apples to apples here.  There's
the command line SAH client, which is all that's available for the
Unices (sp?), Unix work-alikes (Linux, BSD), VMS, etc. and is also
available for Windows.  Then, there's the Windows (and I think Mac)
screensaver client.  

The Windows screensaver client can run in a manner not unlike the
command line client if you configure it to 1) be the Windows screensaver
(SAH becomes a screensaver choice in Control Panel post-install) 2) The
SAH client must be told to put up a blank screen instead of the carpet
plot graphic and 3) The SAH client must be told to run all the time and
connect automatically.

I would surmise that the speed difference you're seeing is due to some
deviation from that recipe.  

It is my understanding that on Intel/AMD hardware, the combination of
WinNT and the SAH command line client for Windows is the fastest, but
not by much.  

By way of reference, the PC133 K7/750 that I am now typing on blows
through a work unit in about 10hr5m of CPU time, which isn't much
shorter than the amount of real time involved.  This is version 3.03 of
the 686 glibc binary.  

- Jeff

On Wed, 2002-07-24 at 07:59, Keith Hopkins wrote:
> 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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