ANN: SETI@Home Service version 2.1

ANN: SETI@Home Service version 2.1

[Ted Dennison]

Version 2.1 of the SETI@Home Service is now available for download at
http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/SETI/SETI_Service.html . 

The major innovation in this version is the ability to designate processes for
which the SETI@Home clients will be suspended or killed. The clients will
automaticly be restarted when the designated process(es) complete their
execution.

To accomplish this, a new package has been added to the thick Windows bindings:
Performance_Information. This package encapsulates the ability to query the
NT/Win2k registry for any kind of real-time performance information. Pretty much
any information available via the Windows Task Manager or "perfmon" must be read
in this way (and its a *bear* to do, let me tell you...) I only needed the
ability to get the names of the running processes, so this facility isn't quite
complete (and probably isn't yet much good for anything else). But for the next
SETI@Home Service version I plan to add detection of CPU load, which will
require me to make this package much more complete.

This version also upgrades the AWS support to AWS 0.10 (that's "zero point ten"
:-) ), and includes one new routine in the Registry package. I suspect that the
SETI@Home Service may be the most widely used AWS program in existance. 

Statistical digressison: I'm not metering downloads, but the entire SETI@Home
project has over 3 million users, 500,000 of which are considered "active". Over
300 million results have been submitted, about 230 million of which were
submitted by Wintel boxes. 50 million of those were submitted by the
command-line client (which is the client "serious" users prefer, due to its
speed). Presumably most of these users are not programmers, although probably a
fair amount of the "serious" users are. (Certianly most of the emails I get
about the project are from non-programmers :-) ).

For those unfamiliar with the project, a short blurb follows. For more
information, see the website at
http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/SETI/SETI_Service.html

------------
The SETI@Home service is a Windows NT service that controls a SETI@Home
command-line client. Since it is implemented as a service, it is only usable on
systems running Windows NT or Windows 2000.

The goal of the SETI@Home Service is to help maximize your system's SETI@Home
work-unit output. It uses the command-line client, which elimiates processing
cycles that would otherwise be lost to displaying graphics. As a further boost,
even the client's text output is disabled. The client is run as a background
process, so that it can continually work without impacting anything else you may
want to do on your machine.

But the main benefit to running the client as a service is that it runs the
client as long as your machine is booted. You no longer need to leave yourself
logged on to process work units. If your machine is rebooted while you are away
from it for any reason (eg: power outage), the SETI@Home Service will resume
processing immediately after your machine reboots. A third way the SETI@Home
Service helps you is with network outages. If your network connection happens to
be down when the SETI@Home client completes a unit, it will quite likely
terminate. This can leave you without any SETI processing for an extended period
of time until you come back to the machine and notice the client's window is
gone. The SETI@Home Service automaticly detects termination of the SETI@Home
client and restarts it. A fourth way the SETI@Home Service helps you is with its
handy built-in web server, which can report client status to any connected PC
via your web-browser.

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T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
          home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com