Macintosh tips

...for SETI@home

  1. Set the screen saver to blank at 0 minutes, the graphics use up a lot of processing power. If the PC is in a high traffic area, set it to blank at 5 minutes, so people ask for the cool screensaver.
  2. In 1996, Motorola released an optimized math library for PowerPC called LibMotoSh. [Tech Specs | Performance Info | FAQ | Download ] It speeds up many floating point operations, which seems likely to help out SETI@home doing all those FFTs. I haven't done extensive testing, but my time went down about 20% after I installed it.
    There's a different math library based on Motorola's code, called MathLibMoto. It's slightly faster than LibMotoSh, but perhaps not quite as accurate (the two begin to differ after about 16 places). LibMotoSh gives exactly the same results as Apple's built-in math library.
  3. Mac users should download PeeKaBoo and set SETI@home's priority to high if they are just going to run SETI@home.
  4. A Mac version of PTFB (an automated button pusher) might be "Okey Dokey".
  5. "Check out MacAddict's info on speeding up the processing times of the SETI packets. Check out the Troubleshooting section for how to utilize a RAM disk to speed up the processes ever so much!" (and get a better night's sleep).