[ydl-gen] SETI at Home for PS3 alpha testing

[Gaurav Khanna]

Hello all

A few weeks ago I built the BOINC based SETI at Home distributed computing
client for the PlayStation3 running YDL (Yellow Dog Linux). I have been
testing it myself for a few days now and it appears to be working properly
and its performance isn't too bad for an "alpha" release.

On the Cell, the FFT computation, which is the computationally intensive
part of the SETI app, is done on the SPEs while the rest is done on the
PPE. Moreover, it runs two copies of the SETI app simultaneously i.e.
pretends that the Cell is a dual core system. I found this combination to
be an "optimal" choice for now, because in this manner the app utilizes
the fact that the PPE can run two threads simultaneously. Of course, in
this implementation, each copy of the app only uses 3 SPEs for the FFT
computation.

>From what I can tell the performance of this Cell app, on average, is not
bad. It is competes well with high-end Pentiums, Xeons, etc. but not as
well with the very recent offerings from Intel, i.e.  C2Ds, new Xeons,
etc. Moreover, its performance varies tremendously on the type of work
unit it gets. Thats why I need a lot more performance data to understand
problem spots, for further improving it. If you do decide to run it on
your PS3 running Linux, please do join the SETI at PS3 team, so I can keep
track of how its doing. Thanks.

You can download the PS3/Cell SETI at Home app from here:
http://gravity.phy.umassd.edu/~gkhanna/sah-cell.tar.gz

Instructions on how to run it (using an anonymous platform) are here:

1) Unzip and untar the downloaded file using "tar zxvf sah-cell.tar.gz".
This will create a directory called "SaH".

2) Go to the SETI project website: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ and
create an account, if you don't have one already. You'll need your
"account key", which is a long string of alphanumeric characters that you
usually receive in an email.

3) Now, change your working directory to SaH, by doing a "cd SaH" and then
type the following:
"./boinc_client -no_gui_rpc -attach_project http://setiathome.berkeley.edu
df0d93e384a2700f70e0bc45a1b2c96c"
Here is last string of alphanumeric characters is supposed to be YOUR
account key. Please replace those with that. All this must be entered in a
single line.

4) You should be all set. BOINC will contact the SETI servers and start
getting work. You can check the progress in your SETI account online.

5) If you need to quit and restart, simply typing "./boinc_client
-no_gui_rpc" should be enough.

Feel free to drop me an email if you have any questions or have any
trouble. Thanks.

Good luck,
Gaurav




-----------------------------------------------

GAURAV KHANNA
UMass Dartmouth, Physics
(508) 910 6605
http://gravity.phy.umassd.edu/

"Black holes are where God divided by zero." - Steven Wright