<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Gwen:
You can read here about the future of Seti@home. Sounds as if BOINC could be a myriad of distributed computing projects. Am I reading that correctly, Mark? </font>
Right you are Gwen. There will be a lot of different distributed computing projects but they will start with Astropulse and then shortly after that will come SETI@home II which will survey the southern sky from the Parkes Observatory in Australia. There is a link to it on my links page.
Linnea~ I'm not quite sure yet how the user will get credit. They have been talking about using a "cobblestone" which will be based on your total time computing rather than one credit for one wu. This doesn't sound palatable but I think it will be "a good thing" as Martha Stewart would be heard saying.
Also, the timeline that they have posted up at the SETI@home site isn't necessarily set in stone. It's just a general guideline. I hope they let it last at least until they have achieved 1 billion wu's crunched. That would be something! They are currently at about 730 million and are getting back over 1 million per day so that wouldn't be too difficult to make happen.
Also, BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) is an open-source program that will be able to handle any distributed computing projects. You could start one yourself and start your own thing if you could tweak the program to meet your needs or find someone to do it. According to the admin at Berkeley it wouldn't be too hard to do. That's the mind of a programmer telling you that though. I'm not sure I would attempt it.
In the meantime, I'm only using a few of my computers to beta-test BOINC with Astropulse and it's
almost bug-free! It won't be long now!
Check out this link to see who's already onboard and what the credits look like:
Click Here
Go down to the bottom of the page and click on Top Users or Top Teams to see what the credits will look like.
Mark