My congratulations to the E@H planning and development team

I thought I would add a bit of 'behind-the-scenes' data to this thread.

When Einstein@Home first started up, we delayed our launch so that we could first put new server and database hardware into place. We sized these so that we could handle about one million active users. The idea was that as the project grew, we would not have to keep upgrading this hardware.

Right now (10 December 2005) our database server is showing about a 5% load, and our project server is showing about an 8% load. While it is daring the gods to say this, I don't anticipate any problems due to rapid growth during the past few weeks, or during the next few weeks. We still have a lot of room for growth!

Part of the problem that SETI is experiencing is because their project is built around donated hardware, some of which is a few years old and no longer state-of-the-art. Einstein@Home is running on just two modern high-end Linux server boxes, so our hardware is both faster and more reliable. We also purchased identical backup systems for both the project server and database server, so that these can be swapped into place quickly if the production hardware acts up.

I talk quite a lot with David Anderson, and know that SETI is working as hard as they can to address and fix the problems that they are encountering. This is hard since (like Einstein@Home) they are not a well-funded project and a handful of people are doing all the work. I am sure that SETI will fix their problems, but it may take some time. Meanwhile, SETI users should celebrate BOINC's multi-project capability and donate their CPU cycles to other projects! This capability, after all, was one of the primary reasons why David created BOINC.

Cheers,
Bruce