SETI@home's progress through its tapes

Based on information sent to me by participating Unix users , here is the progress made from 26 May 1999 through 19 Sep 1999. If you want to find your current work unit in these charts, you can almost (but not quite) tell from the date. (For example, 28fe99aa was processed a month after 01mr99aa, and they both contain some WU's from the morning of March 1.) Your tape name is the first part of the work unit name, which is found near the beginning of work_unit.txt. (To see it on a Mac (and probably Windows), drag the file onto Excel. On Unix, grep name work_unit.txt). Apparently, it's named after the date it was started at Arecibo.

A tape holds almost a day's worth of data, but often it runs out the same day it was started, the new tape will have the same date but end in ab. A 35Gb tape yields about 140,000 work units, which are 250kb+headers. The fifty-eight tapes seen so far must represent about 2,030 gigabytes! That's about 8.1 million work units.

Note that there are normally three tapes being split by three different servers.

Tapes processed in the past week

Tape	First seen	Last seen	|<— 31 Aug 1999	19 Sep 1999 —>|
23ja99aa	15 Sep 1999	18 Sep 1999
16mr99ab	31 Aug 1999	14 Sep 1999
18mr99aa	6 Sep 1999	13 Sep 1999
18mr99ab	8 Sep 1999	12 Sep 1999
19mr99aa	13 Sep 1999	16 Sep 1999
20mr99aa	13 Sep 1999	18 Sep 1999
20mr99ab	14 Sep 1999	19 Sep 1999
21mr99aa	16 Sep 1999	18 Sep 1999
22mr99aa	10 Sep 1999	17 Sep 1999
22mr99ab	11 Sep 1999	16 Sep 1999
24mr99aa	16 Sep 1999	17 Sep 1999

All 58 tapes, summarized by month

Click on a month to see a chart of when tapes recorded that month were processed.

# tapes and month recorded	First seen	Last seen	|<— 26 May 1999	19 Sep 1999 —>|
20 tapes recorded Jan 5-23, 1999	26 May 1999	18 Sep 1999
10 tapes recorded Feb 21-28, 1999	16 Jun 1999	17 Aug 1999
28 tapes recorded Mar 1-24, 1999	20 Jun 1999	19 Sep 1999

Historic progress by week

Date range	Tapes started		Tapes apparently finished
12 Sep 1999 19 Sep 1999	6	23ja99aa, 19mr99aa, 20mr99aa, 20mr99ab, 21mr99aa, 24mr99aa	6	16mr99ab, 18mr99aa, 19mr99aa, 22mr99aa, 22mr99ab, 24mr99aa
5 Sep 1999 12 Sep 1999	4	18mr99aa, 18mr99ab, 22mr99aa, 22mr99ab	6	22ja99aa, 15mr99aa, 15mr99ab, 16mr99aa, 17mr99aa, 18mr99ab
29 Aug 1999 5 Sep 1999	4	15mr99ab, 16mr99aa, 16mr99ab, 17mr99aa	4	21ja99ab, 13mr99aa, 13mr99ab, 14mr99aa
22 Aug 1999 29 Aug 1999	6	20ja99aa, 21ja99ab, 22ja99aa, 13mr99ab, 14mr99aa, 15mr99aa	6	05ja99aa, 18ja99aa, 19ja99aa, 20ja99aa, 06mr99aa, 07mr99aa
15 Aug 1999 22 Aug 1999	5	18ja99aa, 19ja99aa, 06mr99aa, 07mr99aa, 13mr99aa	5	06ja99aa, 06ja99ab, 27fe99ab, 28fe99aa, 07mr99ab
8 Aug 1999 15 Aug 1999	4	06ja99aa, 06ja99ab, 28fe99aa, 07mr99ab	2	17ja99ab, 26fe99aa
1 Aug 1999 8 Aug 1999	4	05ja99aa, 17ja99ab, 26fe99aa, 27fe99ab	3	17ja99aa, 25fe99ab, 05mr99ab
25 Jul 1999 1 Aug 1999	4	14ja99aa, 17ja99aa, 25fe99ab, 05mr99ab	5	12ja99ab, 13ja99aa, 14ja99aa, 25fe99aa, 05mr99aa
18 Jul 1999 25 Jul 1999	4	12ja99ab, 13ja99aa, 25fe99aa, 05mr99aa	5	11ja99ab, 23fe99aa, 23fe99ab, 24fe99aa, 04mr99aa
11 Jul 1999 18 Jul 1999	3	23fe99aa, 23fe99ab, 24fe99aa	4	10ja99ab, 11ja99aa, 03mr99aa, 03mr99ab
4 Jul 1999 11 Jul 1999	5	11ja99aa, 11ja99ab, 22fe99aa, 03mr99ab, 04mr99aa	4	10ja99aa, 22fe99aa, 01mr99aa, 01mr99ab
27 Jun 1999 4 Jul 1999	2	10ja99ab, 03mr99aa	3	09ja99aa, 21fe99aa, 02mr99aa
20 Jun 1999 27 Jun 1999	5	09ja99aa, 10ja99aa, 01mr99aa, 01mr99ab, 02mr99aa	0
13 Jun 1999 20 Jun 1999	1	21fe99aa	1	08ja99aa
6 Jun 1999 13 Jun 1999	0		0
30 May 1999 6 Jun 1999	0		0
23 May 1999 30 May 1999	1	08ja99aa	0

Conclusion

As you can see, steady progress is being made. Note that the level of participation is so great that the rate of progress is currently limited to the rate at which Berkeley can split tapes into work units, even after their capacity was greatly expanded in June.

And remember: Arecibo sweeps across about 360° of sky each day. Two data units taken an hour apart may contains signals from a thousand light years apart. Newly split January data units are just as fresh as April ones.