Cav's Place

This afternoon, the total credit earned for running SETI@home just passed three million, and at the moment I’m writing this it’s 3000264, so I thought that was worth a post. In order to see the total amount of work done for the project over the 15 and a half years since I joined it, however, the 1100 SETI@home Classic work units completed before the project evolved and was integrated into BOINC should also be added; and yes, I clearly remember holding off switching over to the new software until I reached such a round number. The exact date I joined is listed as July 15, 1999 by SETI@home and July 14, 1999 by BOINC, which is quite clearly a time zone issue, as my information had to be imported directly from the SETI@home database into the BOINC one when the infrastructure was launched.
Over the years, I only had my computer work on other projects when SETI@home work was not available, so any other credits are negligible, but I’ll list them anyway: 98047, or 98046 according to the BOINC statistics, for climateprediction.net, 10668 for MilkyWay@Home, and what BOINC lists as 9686 for World Community Grid, or more specifically for The Clean Energy Project – Phase 2. However, World Community Grid doesn’t have the same style of account pages and statistics as the other projects, the project itself reporting 67800 points, though it works out the same since the ratio is listed as seven points per credit.
The plan is still to look into adding another project permanently, but I’ll only do so after I’ll get a better computer that will allow me to add other projects without reducing the processing power dedicated to SETI@home, and I’ll only consider clearly “green” projects, which are very few. And yes, I’m perfectly aware that SETI@home doesn’t exactly generate useful scientific results and may in fact never do so, but my commitment to it is largely due to the fact that this project popularized the concept of volunteer distributed computing and evolved into this infrastructure used now by so many others, which may not have existed without it, and for that reason I will not give up on it nor let others take priority for as long as it’ll continue to exist and send sufficient work units.