My friend Rohan noticed some time ago that I had over 7000 units on SETI@Home, and he appeared to take it as some sort of challenge.
I’d actually stopped doing SETI@Home for a few reasons:
- My computers kept over-heating and crashing
- Task swapping in a dual Althlon machine using Linux 2.4 can get abysmally slow at times. I have no idea why, but I suspect 2.6 will help this a lot.
Rohan co-opted some significant hardware at work for a while, and very quickly got over 3,000 units. And now he’s just running it on his personal machines at work and home, and he’s over 5,000 now, and gunning to beat me.
A while back I took steps to improve the cooling in my main server, adding gigantic one pound copper cooling fins on both processors and adding several case and hard disk fans. So the question becomes – should I respond to this challenge? Rohan probably has newer computers than me, so even if I accepted the challenge, I think it would degenerate to “Can I reach 10,000 units before he passes me”. On the other hand, I have been enjoying the great uptimes I’ve been getting since I stopped running it.
19:53:22 up 65 days, 12:44, 17 users, load average: 0.29, 0.25, 0.24
Decisions, decisions.
Kick his ass!