| Subject: Hail, Brag and Fare Well |
| From: anderson@wisc.edu (Jess Anderson) |
| Date: 18/10/2003, 11:59 |
| Newsgroups: alt.sci.seti,sci.astro.seti |
My latest (and last) stats report:
--
Name: Jess Anderson
Results Received: 17000
Total CPU Time: 14.903 years
Average CPU Time per work unit: 7 hr 40 min 45.4 sec
Average results received per day: 10.53
Last result returned: Sat Oct 18 10:52:00 2003 UTC
Registered on: Tue May 18 14:19:54 1999 UTC
SETI@home user for: 4.422 years
You belong to the group named: Carolyn's Clinic
Your rank out of 4716292 total users is: 6002nd place.
The number of users who have this rank: 2
You have completed more work units than 99.873% of our users.
--
Four years and five months ago today I joined the Seti@Home
project with a single Linux machine. I was then about to retire
after almost 44 years in scientific and academic computing at
the University of Wisconsin.
As time went along after retirement, I was able to add
resources to my home network, six machines eventually. They all
crunched for S@H . For quite some time now I've have been able
to add ~24 WU a day to my slowly mounting total.
It wasn't until I'd been running a year that I started to keep
a daily tally:
date wu done delta years
---------- ------- ----- -----
2000.05.18 615 1.00
2000.11.18 1050 435 1.50
2001.05.18 1800 750 2.00
2001.11.18 2810 1010 2.50
2002.05.19 4595 1785 3.00
2002.11.18 8922 4327 3.50
2003.05.18 13322 4400 4.00
2003.10.18 17000 3678 4.42
Somewhere along the line, despite being a life-long non-joiner,
I signed up for the Carolyn's Clinic Team, a great bunch of
people indeed. I think as a group we've managed, mostly with
not very large resources, to make a pretty decent showing in
the S@H team stats. In terms of WU/day I was in 10th place; in
terms of completed WUs, in 6th place, among the team's 115
members. The team total is nearing 500,000 WUs, fantastic
indeed.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of participation in S@H, I
think, is that people really interact with each other in these
newsgroups, render assistance wherever they can, and give just
as hearty and sincere encouragement to modest crunchers as to
heavy hitters. I'll likely miss that sort of camaraderie and
respect.
In addition, it's gratifying to have been a part of an
unprecedented scientific and computational enterprise founded
on the notion of widespread, voluntary international
cooperation.
(How wonderful it would be if the world's nation-states and
disparate cultures could do as well at serving mutual
interests, eh?)
While I would never have allowed fully autonomous client
software upgrades -- giving up that particular kind of
oversight is just not my style -- I have no beefs about the
announced plans for Seti II under BOINC.
The decisive factor turns out to be me. Other interests are
commanding increasing fractions of my available time and
energy, and I've come to feel a degree of completion wrt
this particular effort. I realized a few days ago that I was
about to land on a suitable round number ending in zeroes.
"Ah," I told myself, "call it a goal and off you go." For me
moving on is the right thing at the right time. And so it is,
here and now.
Have a blast and keep crunching. Success to all your ventures
and may all your dreams be fully realized.
Jess Anderson