As I am a big proponent of the SETI@Home project as well as a Linux user, discovering that optimized SETI applications existed and how to use them was important. It took quite some time to figure this all out by myself since there are hardly any (from what I could find) resources on SETI@Home optimized clients on Linux. Eventually I ran into this site which offers SSE3 and SSSE3 optimized clients for Linux in addition to SSE, SSE2, and SSE3 clients for FreeBSD.
For those of you who don’t know what SETI@Home optimizers are, they are essentially specialized versions of the standard version of the SETI@Home client which take advantage of extended floating-point instruction sets available to certain x86 (Intel, AMD, or the like) processors. Using these instruction sets allows optimized clients to complete work many times faster than it could before with the standard client. For example, prior to using an SSSE3 optimized client on my Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 my recent average credit (RAC) on SETI was in the 500 range including one other active machine and now my RAC has spiked over 2,500 not including the other active machine.
Filed under:Tags: boinc, client, Linux, optimized, seti, setiathome