Forums | MacLife

Well, new to me, anyway.  I've been running "version 6" of Alex Kan's optimized sah app for several months now on my G4 400 MHz computer.  It's been running extremely well, returning validated results.  In my informal spot checks, it takes about twice as many seconds as Intel computers in the 2.5 - 3 GHz range.  Gotta love Altivec!

Anyway, I rarely visit the SAH forums, since they seem to be such a bottomless pit of bile, but I noticed that Alex Kan has released "version 7" of the worker, in versions optimized for G4, G5, Intel Core Duo, and Intel Core 2 (duo).

Note that all of these versions have "nographics" in their filenames.  This means that the graphics code has been compiled out, giving a further speed-up.  This does mean that they won't drive the screensaver, if you're using it that way.  I run BOINC command-line, so it doesn't bother me.

I've started using v7.1, and it's returned some successful results, but it will take some time to get a better idea how well this one performs.  It at least doesn't appear to be worse.

Mainly so I can find it later, here's the base link to Alex's directory where he's been putting all of the optimized versions, along with the modified source: http://tbp.berkeley.edu/~alexkan/seti/.