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SETI@Home -- Running On A PCI Card
levendis writes: "This has got to be the strangest piece of hardware I have ever seen. It's a PCI card with 6 embedded processors and a flash rom containing Linux and the SETI@home client. The manufacturer claims it can process 6 SETI work units in 16 hours, completely independent of the host CPU."
This is a truly intriguing piece of equipment. I especially liked this bit from the FAQ: "SETI accelerator® uses military surplus components. The chip used on this board was used for target vector calculations in the terrain following radar (TFR) component of the PR-964 Cruise Missile (NATO Codename SAMOWAR)." I wonder whether they could release similar cards adaptable to the emerging pay-for-cycles outfits like ProcessTree. If yes, maybe the card could pay for itself after a while.
To run the SETI client for Linux, they need at the very least the Linux kernel and GNU C library. Since one is covered by the GPL and the other by the LGPL, they are *REQUIRED* to provide the source code to any modifications they made to support their board. Unless they have choosen to illegally violate the GPL and LGPL, there should be enough information provided with the card (or a written offer to uptain the information) to provide for altering the card to do something else.
Or DES, or RSA, etc etc...Not nesseciarily for use on one of the "public" contests if you know what I mean....
Kinda cool that it uses Cruise Missile Radar processors to find E.T.
if you look at the picture of the six cpu card, isn't the bottom, leftmost processor sitting on top of the clock generator? looks like gimp at work.
I bet this card is intended to use SETI@home as an example application for their distributed processing card. Hoping to get a few real customers to buy it for their own projects.
Definitely an interesting idea to use it as an demonstration example for their card. But for the SETI@home project, its not needed. They already have more processing power than they can deal with.
Tom
If you check the HTML codes on the main page, you'll se that there is a reply-to address wich is info@krasnoconv.com and a made by address wich is KrasnoConv@mail.ru
mail.ru is a hotmail like email provider !
Russia + mail.ru == hoax ?!
agree. you could buy a websurfer for $50 hackit into a full 300 Mhz machine using a $10 old HD and $5 assorted components. for $450 you will get 7 of these units, with a computing power larger than the one PCI card, but usable for other purposes as well, including some fun beowulf clustering
The "average person" watches WWF wrestling and Britney Spears' tits. Must everything on this planet supposed to be geared to that person?
Your forgetting something.... You don't need a $1000 box to start with. I have a P60 sitting here, and a ISA vid card, and 4 free PCI slots. Grab ANY $30 box with PCI slots, and your set to go.
Can I use more than one board in my computer?
A: No. Although the chip, due to its original usage, is designed as extremely low power consuming, this would produce too much heat. Also the chip uses a 3-digit binary to identify in the array, which would allow a maximum of 8 chips on one computer.
Can I use more than one board in my computer?
A: No. Although the chip, due to its original usage, is designed as extremely low power consuming, this would produce too much heat. Also the chip uses a 3-digit binary to identify in the array, which would allow a maximum of 8 chips on one computer.
So much for my empty P60 slots...
The site mentions that only one card is installable, because the software can only work with a maximum of eight processors (2^3), and heat and power requirements effectively limit this to 6 per card.
Perhaps your willingness to dedicate $2000 to the SETI project is to be commended, though
Not surprising, since the domain name's only been live for a coupla weeks..
Anywhere?
Yeah, right!
I'm betting this is a shuck!
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
A WebFerret search (did I say that WebFerret is one damn fine app? Too bad the parent company got eaten by ZDNet...) for "PR-964 cruise missile" turned up absolutely nothing anywhere on the web, and a search for "PR-964" turned up 143 hits (when I stopped it..) -- none of which had anything to do with NATO or cruise missles..
(For the curious, the most common hit seemed to be a reference to a 1987 Compliance Test Report from the NHTSA regarding the pounds of force applied to the right femur (964 pounds, to be exact) of a crash dummy in a 1987 Chrysler Le Baron 2 door...)
But I digress..
That whole deal is a scam!
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
I doubt that the FedEx driver is gonna stand around and let you install the board to see if it actually *works* -- so you get a board, and pay for it, and the driver leaves, and...
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
How about we just kill JWZ? That would be a big help to Mozilla.
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You mean like this? How about RAM encryption while you're there?
--
I believe they made a mistake in the spelling of SAMOWAR (since it's a Ukrainian company, they proably used the nearest equivalent, not realizing that the W should be transcribed into a V).
There is, in fact, a NATO codename Samovar - it stands for "SAM Obstruction in Velocity, Angle and Range" - an electronic warfare weapons pod.
Since the top-of-the-range Alpha CPU is running at 750MHz, I'd really like to see what kind of time they got on an 8-CPU box using those - say, 45 minutes per unit?
Google results 1-10 of about 17 for PR-964. Search took 0.07 seconds.
Noir Leather
...WRIST 1" WIDE W/SNAP HOOK $23.00PR 964 BONDAGE RESTRAINT - ANKLE -...
...RESTRAINTS W/LOCKS AND 2 CHAINS $45.00PR L-BIT LEATHER BIT - ONE BUCKLE...
www.w2.com/bondagegear.html - 3k - Cached - Similar pages
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Google results 1-1 of 1 for NATO SAMOWAR. Search took 0.25 seconds.
Ostatni tydzien z Polski.
...plycie XIX-wiecznego stolika pod samowar, odkryl kolekcjoner-antykwariusz...
...Tak bylo i z wstapieniem Polski do NATO. Dunczycy jako pierwsi zgodzili...
polishnews.com/fulltext/hotnews/lastweek.html - 65k - Cached - Similar pages
I'll grant you that, but if you're going to run Linux why pay a premium to Cupertino for the hardware?
He was actually talking about an operating system that can actually use them now, instead of talking about how great its going to be when they can use them in the future.
What an absolute waste of frigging time! Why not develope these cards to do something really usefull like the distributed.net project or rendering quake figures or embedded web servers... SETI? PLEASE!
when they ban enctryption only criminals wi$21*J *#JF$%!@#$':
Global warming? The computers I use haven't contributed anything extra to global warming even though I run 24x7 on some of them. Not all computers are like Intel CPUs. Except for a laptop I'm using all the others use the same amount of power wether they're idle or not.
TA (in the top 100)
I'd be cautious about buying computer
equipment or software from Russia or
former Soviet Union. It probably has
embedded software to keep track of your
HDD, and make your system available for
back door attacks. Computers in FSU are
considered to be of strategic importance
and FSB has made many efforts to control
the net and every aspect of computer business.
Or maybe I'm just paranoid.
Buying, not buying or even just thinking about this card will reduce the amount of usable energy available, eventually leading to the heat death of the universe.
Won't somebody please think of the children?
--Shoeboy
Shal we cry in rage?
Moan in pleasure little man, moan in pleasure.
--Shoeboy
This sounds like a fun, cheap way to get a really cool multi-processor system going.
It runs Linux, it's got embedded flash and RAM, it's got a PCI bus interface... Hmmm...
If they can get Linux into the flash, why can't I get my own stuff in there and have a 6-processor very-pipelined, really cool system?
What are the possibilities for this board? Anyone care to take a guess, or an actual crack at it?
mindslip.
SETI@Home uses Fast Fourier Transforms.
Fast Fourier Transforms on digitised samples can be done using large-integer or arbitrary-precision-number algorithms.
Therefore even Pentiums can do SETI@Home without generating errors.
Or, your main system OS could be Linux, and you could use a similar expansion card with built-in ethernet. Boot up OpenBSD on that and you get the security and functional benifits of keeping a seperate machine for the network firewall without the cost, heat, or noise an extra box adds.
Am I the only one to see what kinda looks like the Adaptec logo on the card? If so, this would definitely dimiss the whole thing as a hoax (and a boring one, at that)
Q: What types of processors are being used?
:)
A: SETI accelerator® uses military surplus components.The chip used on this board was used for target vector calculations in the terrain following radar (TFR) component of the PR-964 Cruise Missile (NATO Codename SAMOWAR).
I wonder how long till we get a full-blown linux distro to fit on a PCI card... Imaging the bootup times!
Nice researching a report. I am, however, surprised this doesn't happen more often. Too bad too. It would have been a cool piece of hardware.
Speak truth to power.
I am not sure the lower speed back to main memory would be a problem. If all of the processing would be done on the graphicsboard, all you would need to read back are the results, which would be much less data then the original data.
(i am not really that familiar with the data involved so i could be mistaken)
Message on our company Intranet:
"You have a sticker in your private area"
beauty is only a light switch away
Integer Math ? PPC 604e or G4
Message on our company Intranet:
"You have a sticker in your private area"
beauty is only a light switch away
And we also don't know if the aliens are using radio signals, have fully converted to fiber, or are blatting out megawatts of TV signals...with antennas which are aimed at their horizons on a rotating planet, creating spiral beams which splat a tiny burst of noise on any receivers...
Finally I got it. They are collecting e-mail addresses to sell them for spammers. Just a guess, but that's the only idea that makes sense.
- The problem I have with this personally is that this solution may not abide to the licensing agreement for the SETI@Home project. Especially this portion: "Distribution of this software is prohibited". The company's FAQ sort of diverts this issue saying that this wasn't a patch and only uses an unmodified version of the client, but unless the company has an agreement with the SETI@Home team, they would be distributing the clients against the restrictions mentioned in the licensing agreement. As of this point I don't know if they do have permission to do this. I do not think that they do though. I cannot see the SETI@Home guys (who have a hard time raising fundage for their project) allowing a company to make a profit out of their work. Only time will tell to see how all of this plays out...legal proceedings may be a problem since the company is based in the Ukraine. I'll keep ya posted what I find out
Well, they specify that the client must be downloaded separately due to copyright reasons, so assuming this whole thing isn't a hoax (which I think it is), it's fully legal._______
Scott Jones
Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
Commodore 64 Democoder
FC Closer
Most of your reasons stand, but heat and size don't - have you seen a 270MHz Arm chip - I have, its the size of my little finger nail, and needs no heat sink.
Though I would say that if you were looking for a processor for this purpose I would think it would have to be sparc or i386 for there to be a client available from seti@home.
-- Don't believe everything you read, hear or think
If they wanted to do this a SETI client would be silly. Try this one. NSA pays off Napster and offers legal aid. Napster releases a upgrade to the client. The license agreement says that they will sell your idle CPU cycles to recoup cost. *BAM* NSA is cracking codes. And no one would care as long as they get their MP3's.
"Sometimes it's hard to tell the dancer from the dance." --Corwin Of Amber in CoC
Wasn't SETI@Home getting more data than they could use because a lot more people were sending data than they initially anticipated? Won't this card just make that situation (much) worse?
I'd like to know if running a dnetc on/for a Geforce would be feasible ?
Video cards nowadays got fabulous power (sometimes, more transistors than CPU) but are specialized. I believe their engines could do some matrix conversions, etc. so why not use them for dnetc or SETI ?
This is really meant to be serious.
wolruf@gmail.com
Multiple processors with SIMD on each one?
You don't say.
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This space unintentionally left unblank.
It would be great if one could reprogram this unit to do other things like 3d rendering or some other cpu intensive task like this. . . Hell, even encode mp3's!
You Like Science?
You Like bottomquark.
And let's not even mention the complete pointlessness (and lack of commercial application)of the card! Exactly why would someone buy one of these? To get rankings kudos?
Wasn't the point of the distributed approach to harness SPARE cycles?
--
Rare Window - free your photos
From the Card FAQ:
Q: Is this the unauthorized patch Berkley is warning not to use?
A: No. This solution is strictly hardware based. It has a standard unmodified linux text client implemented in the flash-rom of the chip. This memory was mainly used to store target and routing information. Apart from the basic drivers, the only software used is a batch-like procedure that assigns the work units to the processor. It's like adding another computer with each processor, without having to buy all the I/O and power supply components which you dont need for SETI@home. The client must be downloaded from Berkeley's download area, it is not part of the package due to copyright restrictions.
--
Get paid for your spare CPU cycles:
There are two kinds of people: 1) those that need closure
Well, there's the brag factor. Or with distributed.net, the better-chance-of-winning factor. Or maybe this is just a cheap way to get spare processors, they *are* reprogramable. I'm sure you could do better though.
But... It does run off of flash rom, so it is reprogramable. It can't be something terribly too off the wall, SETI has a client for it (it's not like they're open source or somethin')
Finally. Thank you.
The response to this is kinda sad. Isn't there supposed to be a technically savvy community around here someplace?
All I can say is...
Suckers!
cheers,
Matthew
--bdj
Now that CPU's are faster, the filters are pretty fast. Oh well, I like to see anything come out. To each their own.
Rader
How about the cops visiting your home to take the PC that holds your very private collection of DeCSS and other soon to be illegal software and code ? Wouldn't it be nice that as soon as they unplug the PC to take it to their lab, they can't read the hard drive anymore ?
My question is:
Why is the domain name registrant in Germany,
with a fake looking phone number??
You're right.
I could buy an e-machine for that money.
This is all an e-machine is good for anyway.
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
1) there's no memory on this board and a SETI client needs quite a lot, 8 processors would hose PCI even with an on chip cache.
.5 micron fabrication would be optimistic and transistors would be more like it.
2) anything in an old cruise missile is going to be hot or slow or both unless it was redesigned and repackaged and that would be $expensive$. Remember
3) The layout of these chips is bloody dense (too dense) and it looks like SMT, again meaning a repackage since that's recent compared to cruise.
I saw that as well--I've got more than one machine at my disposal...
but, then I saw the cost for the six processor card-- ~ US$500.00!
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I've been electricity for more than a year in the quest to be in the top "N thousand", where N is where I currently am....
These boards look pretty cool---hmm, 9 units in 24 hours per card? I could gain some serious headway by installing a couple of these puppies.
I just broke into the top 5000 today, btw.
I wonder how much I've personally contributed to global warming....how much has the SETI project overall contributed to global warming?
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check out http://colotto.com
Hmm...almost $500 for the fully populated card with six processors...
maybe I'll just load the SETI client at work on our Sun E-10000 production box....
I wonder how long till someone would notice....
---
Interested in the Colorado Lottery?
Interested in the Colorado Lottery or Powerball games?
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I believe the appropriate phrase is "Imagine that."
I loved those ads.
This is the sort of thing that I have wanted to see for a while. I always wondered why we can't just add in a card to accelerate some peticular function of the computer. For example when 3D video cards ( ie Voodoo) were add ons to the basic system. I'd love a sort of generic card that you add special processors/embedded systems to to accelerate something. For example maybe math processing is really important to you so you add that in. Maybe DV is important to me so I add in that chip. You could make Quake accelerators that are designed specifically for that engine that would speed up server functions. Is this not a cool idea? I want more customisation in my system!!!
If you're curious, Alacron sells coprocessor boards based on a few different processors including the i860. I'm not exactly sure what they could do, and no mention of price, either (although both are probably mentioned in the PDF on the site).
The reason is that graphics cards are designed to do just that: graphics. According to NVIDIA's developer website (check the FAQ for the GeForce), transformed data cannot be read back from the GeForce system. Even with lower systems, like the Voodoo I, there's no practical way to read data back from the card, even if you did come up with someway to encode your finished data into an image and process it later. Graphics cards are designed to go from main CPU to monitor incredibly fast; they can't go very fast in the other direction, if they can go in the other direction at all. With OpenGL one can use glReadPixels() and glReadBuffer() to read the values from any available buffer (or at least the Z-buffer and color buffer), but that's usually slow because, as I said, graphics cards weren't really designed to go the other way.
:) I can't say it's a bad idea; it's a very good idea, but until someone markets a graphics card that can be programmed to perform general-purpose algorithms, we're probably better off with an actual coprocessor or coprocessor board. Though, I can't really say that there are lots of coprocessor boards either; maybe a graphics-card builder can beat the coprocessor builders to the punch?
I'm sure most of us remember the days of math coprocessors like the 487 (since the 486 SX had no FPU) and even earlier ones like the 8087; it seems the hardware industry is beginning to regress to the math coprocessor days of yore with fancy names like GPU to make itself sound 31337
I went to their "download" area an saw no mention of downloading the source they are using. I imagine they must have made changes to the linux kernel to get it to run on whatever processor(s) they are using. Did anyone else see where the source code is available? Is this legal?
I have 4 free PCI slots............
...and if you checked out the site you'd see that you can only put one in at a time.
I'm a member of Ars Technica Team Lambchop. zAmboni, One of our members, has brought up a very good point, which he posted on our . This site is advertising an add in PCI card for computers which contains anywhere from 1-6 CPUs, and is specifically designed to crunch SETI work units.
h tml"><b>licensing
There are two different cards, a single CPU card and a 1-6 CPU upgradeable card. The cards contain 2x64 kB level 1 cache and 32MB RAM per CPU. The CPU will run at 6.5 x the PCI clock. At the default PCI clock that woud mean a 214 MHz CPU (the CPUs have been tested up to 40MHz on the PCI Bus). As for crunching the work units, onboard ROM chips would contain the "unmodified" linux client, as well as the required routines of linux itself. The card ROM is flashable so when there is an upgrade in the SETI client it can be flashed into the card.
The site claims it can process 1 work unit in 15 hours, and at the most, 6 work units in 16 hours (one for each CPU installed). The cost? $89 for the single CPU card, $129 for the upgradable card (with one CPU) and $69 for each additional CPU.
I think that this is a pretty innovative solution. First off because it is using CPUs harvested from surplus military hardware. Specifically from target vector portion of the terrain following radar of cruise missiles. With the trend leaning toward using distributed projects as a solution for large scale computing, plus many of them planning to pay for crunching data, this may help people make some cash on the side.
The problem I have with this personally is that this solution may not abide to the <a href="http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/license.
agreement</b></a> for the SETI@Home project. Especially this portion: "Distribution of this software is prohibited". The company's FAQ sort of diverts this issue saying that this wasn't a patch and only uses an unmodified version of the client, but unless the company has an agreement with the SETI@Home team, they would be distributing the clients against the restrictions mentioned in the licensing agreement. As of this point I don't know if they do have permission to do this. I do not think that they do though. I cannot see the SETI@Home guys (who have a hard time raising fundage for their project) allowing a company to make a profit out of their work. Only time will tell to see how all of this plays out...legal proceedings may be a problem since the company is based in the Ukraine. I'll keep ya posted what I find out
It is interesting actually. You get a meta-meta-moderation if you look at all the weblogs from 20,000 feet or so. They do steal from each other. But, if you look at the raw numbers of weblogs that post a link to the story, it tells you something about the perceived value of the story. Cool, no?
Interesting weblog stuff:
http://www.linkwatcher.com/
http://beebo.org/metalog/ratings/
http://www.weblogs.com/
WebWord.com -- Usability Weblog and Vortal
How to Download YouTube Videos
Nope, not true. If they aquired support
by using kernel modules their home free.
Like with the netbox.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
You mean, good quality live goat porn? That's not a bad idea. Then we could broadcast it into space for any aliens that might be out there.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Where and what is the CPU that Linux is running on? The military surplus chips are OK for the actually modeling (though AFAIK you'd need to heavily hack the SETI clients so they'd use them properly), but Linux would need ARM or something like that to run off, right? I guess you can power a Pentium off a PCI bus (they do it on a bunch of Ultra 5s at work anyway), but I'm curious what they're actually using, esp. since those other chips probably suck a lot of power as well. 6 APICs + a general purpose CPU is a lot of power and heat! The FAQ doesn't mention anything about it.
what about the dolphins? -42-
a mendicone core based Celeron owns RC5...Maybe even one of the coppermine based ones as RC5 is not very dependant on cache, but more raw fpu..
/ce
Did S@H ever fix the problem with the fact they were going to run out of blocks and forced people to redo blocks that were already done? If not, why would anyone want to buy this card? Seems a little silly to me. That is, unless someone could find another purpose for this card. d.net
does it allow someone to modify the linux kernel for comercial purposes and not release the source?
I missed that one.
Well... according to distributed.net's doc... RC5 is ALL integer... http://n0cgi.distributed.net/faq/cache/56.html FYI
This is a better link for the FPU debate... Here...
Actually the RC5 client is based solely on integer math...
here is a link to their FAQ:
RC5 FAQ
Later.
Nice thought process, but not economical or managable. For cheaper and faster results, just add a second, third, fourth CPU.
Hey that was funny. No....really....everyone's laughing.
I'm sure I have enraged all of the Russian Slashdot readers, just because I mocked a building that happened to be in Russia.
A friend of mine - a professor of mathematics - went looking for the source code after I mentioned it to him at a high school reunion. I don't know if he ever found the source for it, or whether he was able to use it for general purpose array processing.
thus the "samowar" is a teapot.
If you google search on the teapot spelling of the name, you find a SAM jammer from Norway. The Norwegian ANTI-MISSILE unit stands for SAM Obstruction in Velocity, Angle and Range.
I think by vectors they mean long arrays of power-time and power-frequency data on which they apply Fourier and other transforms. This is not exactly the same as graphics where you need to apply a perspective xform to many 3d vectors and then rasterize a bunch of polygons.
The site says that it is in the _Ukraine_ though...
--
The opinions contained in this document are in no way expressed.
Which then makes it perfect for digital music synthesis, composition, and audio processing. I just may have to do some research now and see what turns up.
Well - could the card just do the basic work and just output values that a driver will recognize as useful? Maybe just output in wave form and feed it to the sound card? It would be much better if it had its own audio output... that would be very cool.
This is a possibility, but it ends up choking your PCI bus with lots of two-way traffic. If it had it's own audio output and associated DSP, that would put a definite cap on how much information has to come back to the main CPU.
Hey, if a student put this together as a project, maybe I could get my hands on some of these procs and play around with my own ideas... :o)
-----
"You spilled my egg... I needed that egg."
Hmmm, reading down the list, it's possible this is all a hoax anyway. Oh well, better luck next time.
-----
"You spilled my egg... I needed that egg."
I was thinking the same thing, but with a different application: Music synthesis. A lot of music synthesis is based upon FFT, and other vector-based algorithms. Of course, the hard part there is where do you put the audio out?
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"You spilled my egg... I needed that egg."
Look in the lower-left corner of this image of the 6-processor board.
That's an ADAPTEC logo!!!!
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Yes and no. I think they COULD have gone that route (and probably do this for some of their other projects), but the SETI@home project, in my estimation, is more about making people more aware of their mission. Also, SETI has *ALOT* of things going on and limited resources, so I'm guessing that this was probably an interesting solution to their resource allocation problems.
I guess it won't be long until someone figures out how to use those card for something else. How about some extra cpu cycles for Povray or Mesa? Or perhaps as a crypto accelerator?
The possibilities are endless. Just think about it.
The SETI aspect is cool, but I think there are a lot of problems this would be beneficial for if it is easily retaskable. This includes both the internet-based distributed calculation efforts such as distributed.net's projects and the Mersienne (sp?) Prime Search, and local machine programs. Many scientific/engineering problems benefit from parallelization (chemistry applications (ab initio quantum mech, visualization, etc) come to mind, as I'm a chemist ;-) ), so this might be a great way to add some extra computational horsepower to your workstation without having to spend an order of magnitude more for a Beowulfish clustering solution.
Of course, a full-on clustering solution would no doubt perform better but this way every professor and grad student could have a "pocket battleship" solution on their desk. This might work best if the device could be made as transparent in use as possible (like the voodoo^2 cards were for 3d rendering). /dev/numbercruncher? :-)
--
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Depends how you define codebreaking, and what benefits you expect to obtain through advances in codebreaking.
I think the discovery of intelligent, technologically advanced life somewhere other than on this planet would have implications and effects easily transcending what we now consider to be "important" and "relevant".
Maybe people look for aliens instead of codebreaking tech advancements is because they don't need codebreaking as much as they need aliens--yet.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
That somebody's done this? Or that there's probably a market for it? Heck, I might buy one.
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
A: SETI accelerator® has up to 6 embedded processors installed on its board. Each processor calculates one work unit in about hours. That raises your output to up to 6 units every 16 hours, plus the WU your computer can handle in this time. It is like running two or more clients on a dual-processor board.(Example: A PIII 500 will process a work unit in about 8 hours.This adds up to 8 WUs every 16 hours or about one WU every 2 hours!) Lets see. Lets say I have a p3-450 or 500 or faster. I want to increase seti output. Do I go buy a dual processor motherboard for ~ $200 or so and THEN buy another p3-500 for $150 or so for $350 OR do I go buy this card for $500 ? I think the vast majorify of you guys would agree that having a 2nd general purpose proc is better than eating another PCI slot, since the general purpose proc can be used for other stuff in the future while (as far as I can see, this cannot) It doesn't make sense to buy this card if you are trying to get better performance out of a (currently) single processor intel based machine. I suppose if you can't (if you have an athlon/duron/thunderbird) or don't want to go SMP, i suppose these are ok, but seriously, what else can you do with this board ? if these were $100 with 6 processors, I might be interested, but I have a LOT better use for $500 than to spend it on a board like this. Waste of money.
Want the Truth? Then quit searching the skies for it and start searching the Bible. Thank you and God bless.
All right, who's building the Bible@Home - client that analyzes Bible and finds the hidden messages that every mystician seems to find there?
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
Okay, here's the breakdown of the last 24 hours and the historical numbers as well. This board doesn't make it worth the money -- it's a little faster than the historical average, and a little slower than the last-24 hour average.
On a 604e processor @300MHz, I'm averaging a block every 22 hr 58 min 22.2 sec. Can't wait to upgrade to dual G4's and OS X.
blog |
I wish this was designed to do the OGR or RC5 stuff on distributed.net. I would buy atleast one probably more if it worked well. How hard would one of these be to reprogram to do distributed.net stuff?
Samovar is a russian apparatus that is used to prepare and store warm tea on the table. Before the age of electricity it was powered by fire/wood/coal... Litteraly it means "samo"- self, "var"-boil: i.e. "Selfboiler". Here they've replaced the V with a W and you get something as "self-war" - maybe meaning that it guides the misile without external help.
The whole thing still sound very fishy... Who is to tell that this isn't just a part of Echelon (tm) and you are paying for it while it filters your messages before transmiting them to whomever? Well, come to think of it - at least it saves some bandwith... :-)
Than you.
//Frisco
--
"No se rinde el gallo rojo, sólo cuando ya está muerto."
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
As you know MacOS X will support SMP.
However, you may not know that one could install Linux on a Dual-Proc G4 as well.
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Just buy a 2nd PC.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
or even better, IMO, the Casino-21 Climate Simulation Project.(once it gets underway of course.) Useful data would result, interesting question to be worked on, scientific; what more could you ask for in a distributed computing project?
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
I would have a whole lot of CPU cycles to share if the human genome project jumped on this distributed processing trend. Being the sysadmin of 200+ machines (slowest one being a 600MHz Katmai) has its advantages. :-)
Screw Micro$oft.
I cant believe this guy hasn't been modded as a troll...
--- Can i borrow your Clue-Stick(tm)? I need to go beat a few people with it...
What the hell, you're analyzing a bunch of static noise in space! What is it with nerds and watching progress meters?!??!
- soy
It might be that they just wantet to see if there is a market for such devices and will produce it if there seems to be some demand for it.
Stefan Heimers
Don't forget about simultaneously formatting that floppy disk, too!!
... so don't moderate me down for throwing in a little off-topic humor)
You didn't, by chance, have an Amiga at some time in your life, did you?
(Disclaimer: I'm a former/current Amiga user and this is meant to be a jab at Amiga advocates who have always pointed out how the Amiga is superior because it could download a file, play a game, AND format a floppy all at the same time
Well, yeah, but one thing stands out: they are only selling C.O.D. so at least you will get a package with something in it (air, rocks, cool russkie cruise-missile cum seti board). Of course this could be an elaborate scheme to harvest names/addresses. Personally, I run a couple S@H clients, but I'd rather spend $90-$500 on beer and motorcycle parts to enjoy while waiting for ET signals.
-- Don't call me "Sir," I increase entropy for a living!
With that piece of hardware, we're bound to find Alf! C'mon, crunching 6 units in 16 hours? Damn that's crazy!!!
can you say distributed.net?
True, but the idea is still the same -- why spend big bucks on processor time when millions have spare cycles we can harvest?
you aren't doing it at high enough resolution
I am interested in this myself
As I see it:
you need a big rack mount case
Motherboard: $140
2 Celeron processors: $200
64MB Ram: $70
Network Card + port on Hub. 100Mbit:
$40 per unit
I assume they network boot a mosix kernel
(linux with a clustering patch)
And no hard drives in the systems because that's done with NFS
So somewhere in the $400 - $500 per GigaHertz of Celeron Processing power
Not bad at all, but you're still better off with a mainframe (probably an older used one) if you were planning on setting up more than a half dozen or so together
I used to run the BP6 Dual Celey combo (366 -> 523mhz x2 for over 1250Mflops according to WinTune) And bang for the buck, that was the winner.
But the new FPU king is the Athlon T-Bird, check out the specs here at Tom's Hardware (note: the Duron KILLS the Celeron 2, much less the original Celey)
Down the road, look for Linux for PPC on these boards .
If she floats, she's a witch.
Kewl, yes. But it's so fscking limited to that one project, though there must be a possibility to hack it for new programs. How about complete PCs on a PCI that you could use for a Beowulf or something in one case? Or simply run a s@h client on it just as well.
/.ers does it take to hack a light bulb?
--
Q: How many
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Ya know, at first this struck me as a great little device. Then I realized it was a huge waste of money. For $500 you could build a relatively nice system to dedicate to the Seti purpose (approx. prices - case: $40, motherboard: 100, ethernet card: $20, processor: what $340 can buy at the moment) and you have all the parts needed to keep a Seti machine running (granted, you need to borrow some parts for setup).
In addition, you could use the computer for other fun things (personal server, etc) or turn it into a regular computer within reasonable cost. This processor card is unadaptable (at least without some serious hacking). If the card was made to be programmable, then people may find all sorts of interesting uses for it (such as other distributed projects).
Anyway, even if you don't want another computer, but had $500 to spend...I would consider getting a dual-processor motherboard with another processor (depending on speed)...though I'm not sure Seti@Home can support multiple processors, is it a multi-threaded program?
I just don't think the thing is worth even the most devout Seti fan's money, as cool as it may look in one's computer =)
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
No, actually, the most useful project that I have seen come out of either of them is distributed.net's Optimal Golomb Rulers Project. With the results from this project, someone could actually do something practical, like figure out the optimal spacing for radio transmitters, I believe.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
It doesn't surprise me that /. readers embrace the seti@home program, as you have so readily confirmed with your comment: I'd happily drop up to A$1,000 on it now, and another A$500 every couple of months. What surprises me is the fact that slashdot can't even organize itself well enough to notice its got two teams competing in the overall competition: Team Slashdot and Slashdot ... wouldn't it be brilliant if someone actually suggested combining the two?
= =
===============================================
If ignorance is bliss, wipe the smile off my face
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
Actually, in his defense, i was laughing...but then again, i love that kinda third grade shit :)= ===
=============================================
If ignorance is bliss, wipe the smile off my face
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
they actually paid for it? isn't it blatantly clear its a scam by now??? anyway, i'd be joining one of the /. or ars teams... but i'm sendin all my blocks to my college. :)
= ====
In the mean time, i think one of the editors (come on taco, you can do it) needs to suggest everyone on the shitty losing team change to the winning team! be a frontrunner, its the only way to go!
============================================
If ignorance is bliss, wipe the smile off my face
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
Distibuted.net client, and COSM would be good candidates for this sort of hardware.
Now if you'll excuse me I must get back to my bowl of grits.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
They are not. The NATO designation Flanker (see this page) is the Su-27/30/35 etc. It is from Sukhoi, not from the Mikoyan-Gurevich (MiG) design bureau.
--Calum
Compaq has an Alpha machine (8x525mhz) that can do a unit in 1 hr 11 min 18.0 sec. If I were an Origin machine..getting beaten by a Compaq.. I'd feel dirty.
yes, it is a protest against mtv
Rock 'n Roll, Not Pop 'n Soul
Rock 'n Roll, Not Pop 'n Soul
carldrawings.dk3.com
This is cool if for only the reason that you would have a example of Communist computer hardware in your puter. I mean if somebody came out with a Raid controller made out of the main CPU of the MIG 31's radar I would buy it.
Death is the only taste of freedom a man ever gets
Mmmm, not necessarily. Depending on what the processors are, you can pack them damn close. For example, on my desk right now, I have a small daughtercard (about 3"x4") with 8 Analog Devices 21060 SHARC processors on it (4 on each side). Now, admittedly, these aren't PIII-class chips, but they can crank out FFTs pretty fast. :)
Having said that, though, I'm still suspicious about this SETI board.
Don't see why it wouldn't be. The FAQ on the site says that the board is running an unmodified version of SETI's client software. It also says if SETI updates the client you will have to D/L the new client from the People's Republic of Berkley. They have some kind of flash rom utility to install the new client.
-- Spammers: My E-mail server is in California. Consider yourself warned.
Also mentions that the board runs at 6.5 x <PCI BUS Freq>. WTF? Seriously, why would you clock the board's CPUs of a PCI bus? Even cheap ass video cards have their own freq generators...
It's the exact same board for both photos!!! Check the blank spot in the bottom left, just behind the backplate (and note the symbols just below the blank spot). Also note the white square in the far right, it's slight lower on the 6cpu version, but the exact same.
The chips are way too close in the multiprocessor board. Yes, they could be expensive thru-board, but don't forget that the other components missing from the single board (the ram chip?/flash rom?) would have to be on the other side, (one for each cpu? at least ram...) and would take up a lot of room. Looking at those clearances, it seems a little too close...
Pictures: Right click and save the CA-01 picture as a bitmap, and open it in Paint. (eep, have to use IE and don't have PShop at work...sigh). If you zoom in, and look at the bottom of the backplate, you should be able to see a faint antialiasing artifact where the plate was cut using (presumably) the magic wand and moved. Ergo, it's a seriously edited photo, and I wouldn't trust it with my $0.25, let alone $89. (wait a sec, people earlier were quoting prices of $500, and now that I look at it, the prices are $89 for a single board, and $129 for the multi with one proc...plus $69 per extra cpu, that smells very fishy.)
Hoax. /. seems to be falling for a lot more of these of late...
It's the traces that are the problem...there's not enough room to pull out that many traces from each chip.
Hacking this card could just as well be the whole purpose of it, the SETI client being just a front to sell military hardware without the bad rep.
Hey!
There are no slots!
Plus the single-processor board has a different processor on it.
But then, anyone who'd be desperate to spend a three-figure sum on a card so they can donate more spare processor time without having to loose any of thier spare processor time deserves to be ripped off.
Just my $0.02
Michael Tandy
...another insightless comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Heading in the right direction for distributed rendering though. Could pay for itself in some business models....
Having recently played a few hours of D2...
:-) (And why are the MP chips different from the SP chip? I'd assume that qualifying one chip design/model is better than doing the same for two, especially for long-range ballistics...)
.de contacts and physical locations:
Does the MP board look socketable at all?
What's that white L-shaped component next to the transistor on the far left?
Why can I find no reference to 'Krasnokutovka'?
Whois info shows
whois -h whois.schlund.de krasnoconv.com % The data in the WHOIS database of Schlund+Partner AG is provided by % Schlund+Partner for information purposes, and to assist persons in % obtaining information about or related to a domain name registration % record. Schlund+Partner does not guaantee its accuracy. By submitting % a WHOIS query, you agree that you will use this data only for lawful % purposes and that, under no circumstances, you will use this data to % (1) allow, enable, or otherwise support the transmission of mass % unsolicited, commercial advertising or solicitations via E-mail % (spam); or % (2) enable high volume, automated, electronic processes that apply to % Schlund+Partner or its systems. % Schlund+Partner reserves the right to modify these terms at any time. % By submitting this query, you agree to abide by this policy. domain: krasnoconv.com created: Jul 1 2000 last-changed: Jul 1 2000 registration-expiration: Jul 1 2001 nserver: ns7.schlund.de 195.20.224.93 nserver: ns8.schlund.de 195.20.225.38 registrant-title: Herr registrant-firstname: Andrej registrant-lastname: Schachnasarow registrant-organization: KrasnoConv registrant-street: Au 5 registrant-pcode: 94140 registrant-city: Ering registrant-ccode: DE registrant-phone: +49 8573 12345 registrant-email: KrasnoConv@mail.ru admin-c-title: Herr admin-c-firstname: Andrej admin-c-lastname: Schachnasarow admin-c-organization: KrasnoConv admin-c-street: Au 5 admin-c-pcode: 94140 admin-c-city: Ering admin-c-ccode: DE admin-c-phone: +49 8573 12345 admin-c-email: KrasnoConv@mail.ru tech-c-firstname: Puretec tech-c-lastname: Hostmaster tech-c-organization: 1&1 Puretec GmbH tech-c-street: Erbprinzenstr. 4-12 tech-c-pcode: 76133 tech-c-city: Karlsruhe tech-c-ccode: DE tech-c-phone: +49 1908 70700 tech-c-fax: +49 1805 001372 tech-c-email: info@puretec.de zone-c-firstname: Puretec zone-c-lastname: Hostmaster zone-c-organization: 1&1 Puretec GmbH zone-c-street: Erbprinzenstr. 4-12 zone-c-pcode: 76133 zone-c-city: Karlsruhe zone-c-ccode: DE zone-c-phone: +49 1908 70700 zone-c-fax: +49 1805 001372 zone-c-email: info@puretec.de bill-c-title: Herr bill-c-firstname: Andreas bill-c-lastname: Mueller bill-c-organization: Schlund + Partner AG bill-c-street: Erbprinzenstr. 4-12 bill-c-pcode: 76133 bill-c-city: Karlsruhe bill-c-ccode: DE bill-c-phone: +49 721 91374 80 bill-c-fax: +49 721 91374 20 bill-c-email: billing@schlund.de % See http://www.schlund.de for information about Schlund+Partner AG
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
From a SLOVAK-English dictionary (in which I could not find any slovak words containing W...): samovar: tea urn samovrah: suicide samo~: self, one's var: steam, hot water Draw your own conclusions :-)
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
I have 4 free PCI slots............
~~~~~~~~~~
Martee
> Look, you don't have to get into details to get
> the joke. It's no more realistic then the
> parrot sketch. You wanna see what "samowar"
> looks like?
There's nothing inherently unlikely about
"samowar"--words starting with "s" are NATO standard for codenaming Russian surface-to-
surface missiles, and some of them are pretty
damned strange; for example, the SS-17 "SPANKER",
the SS-15 "SCROOGE" and the SS-12 "SCALEBOARD".
However, there's no Russian missile codenamed
"SAMOWAR" that I can find--nor "SAMOVAR",
either.
Chris Mattern
Actually, there's an article in this month's Wired about different ways of using distributed computing.. Unfortunately, the article isn't online..
But it does bring up some good points about using shared harddrive space, shared ram.. but nothing about scanning ELFs.. =)
---
when the rain comes, they run and hide their heads. they might as well be dead.
With the risk of getting of topic: There is a software package called vmware that enables to boot windows from a linux window(or prompt).
Yeah, and when the aliens get here and find out what we've been doing to brother whale and sister porpoise, we are in a world of hurt.
Is this card reprogrammable to do other things, like what *I* want it to do on MY system?
Fear the government that fears your guns. Fear the government that fears your computers. Remove them from my email.
True, if they're intellegent, they'll find us, or maybe they'll decide to ignore us ;)
Fear the government that fears your guns. Fear the government that fears your computers. Remove them from my email.
funny that you mention scaning space for an ELF executables, I have thought of doing that to find the perfect programs. :-)
Time does not wait.
But the next-generation nVidia chipset in the X-Box has a SIMD processor capable of running nine instructions per pixel... if you could read those back you could probly make a SETI@Home client out of an X-Box!
Yeah, when upgrades them next, she could probably open her own fab with the old ones...no, wait, that's silicon
Kill, Tux, kill!
Not really related:
SAMOVAR
[Norway] SAM Obstruction in Velocity, Angle and Range. Electronic jamming pod fitted to Tiger-PAWS aircraft.
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
cat
i havent checked my /. in about a week, and i just checked the site and they have posted *gasp* THE TRUTH!! on that truth page, they declare that they made this hoax to draw folks in, and IMHO, THIS WAS ONE HUGE TROLL!
no matter how many open PCI slots your computer has, you can only use one card. read the faq. this is too bad, as many slashdotters have already expressed interest in filling up boxes with these things. perhaps in the future they will release a card that is scalable. 6 cards with 6 processors each! it'd fly! now imagine making a cluster of such boxes! mmmm....
also, i think it'd be cool if a big OEM stepped up and started making these standard. we just have to find ET! he needs to get home...
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
Wouldn't such an effort be better directed towards running a distributed.net client on this? Codebreaking is far more important and relevant today than searching for extraterrestrial lifeforms (which we wouldn't understand anyway).
While it seems that this SETI@home card is a hoax, its not far off from some ideas I've for a Distributed.net client. I say D.net because I personally feel it serves a better purpose, searching for something that does have a definable end. However, I'd like some people's opinions on these ideas. 1.) Make a program that can use the Graphics Processors like the GeForce process D.net work units. I'm not sure if graphics processors have the commands needed, or if this can be done in an off screen buffer that won't affect your screen for normal use. or 2.) Actually create one of those cards, altho, I don't quite see the purpose of putting a full Linux kernel on the card. It seems to me it adds extra cost to the card where as some modification of the client would detect and use the card. Just wondering if anyone has any opinions on how viable either of these projects would be. -Algernon Yeah, I'm a stats slut, and I won't rest 'til I'm pulling 1 GKeys/s
An excellent idea, but I would want it to do more than just ask you at boot up. If it asks you at boot alone, that would protect you from say, the government coming in and seizing your HD after you had shutdown the computer, but if the computer's up and running you don't accomplish anything, because it will decrypt the files for anybody.
What you need is something that works with the user/pw system of your OS (be it Linux or Windows or MacOS or whatever flavor you choose) so that you can set preferences as to when it should query you for a pw, and it should have the option to query you anytime the OS opens a file.
At least, such is how I would have it.
Well - could the card just not do the basic work and just output values that a driver will recognize as useful? Maybe just output in wave form and feed it to the sound card? It would be much better if it had its own audio output... that would be very cool. :) Whoever designed this card should start looking at the million different things he can do with those processors besides SETI!
This is where my ignorance on the topic comes in. :)
This is a hoax. This shows that they have completed NO work units... A geek loveing seti and his money are soon parted.
As the German version of ZDNET announced today, the ukrainian Seti accelerator board is a Hoax made by German students: Drei Deutschen gelingt Sommer-Hoax Nessi lebt in einer ukrainischen Chip-Schmiede 26. Juli 2000 (sri) Drei Deutsche haben den bisher schönsten Sommer-Hoax des Jahres mit viel Liebe zum Detail ins Netz gestellt: Das Märchen vom Seti-Accelerator der ukrainischen Chipschmiede Krasnoconv ist zu schön, um es unerwähnt zu lassen. Das Seti-Projekt der Universität Berkeley bietet einen Bildschirmschoner an, der die ansonsten ungenutze Rechenleistung von Desktop-PCs nutzt, um Daten von der Suche nach Außerirdischen auszuwerten. Krasnoconv hatte für das Verarbeiten der Datenpakete einen "Hardware-Accelerator" angeboten. Zahlreiche internationale Publikationen haben über die PCI-Karte mit den bis zu sechs Prozessoren berichtet, die von einem ukrainischen Werk-Studenten entwickelt wurde. Ausgestattet sollte die Karte mit überzähligen PR-964-CPUs sein, die die NATO in Cruise Missiles einsetzt. Dadurch war es fast unmöglich, die von "Krasnoconv" angegebenen Spezifikationen zu überprüfen. DirkS, Setihoc und Lyons, die drei Urheber des Scherzes, hatten Glück: In einer Seti-Newsgroup fragte jemand, ob es möglich sei, mit einer Zusatz-CPU mehr Seti-Daten zu verarbeiten. Die Deutschen Alien-Fans antworteten, dass die ukrainische Firma "Kransoconv" genau so ein Produkt anbietet und ab 23. Juni explodierten die Hits auf Krasnoconv.com. Seti-Fans begannen, das Singel-Prozessor-Board für 89 Dollar oder das Multi-CPU-Board für 129 Dollar plus 69 Dollar pro Prozessor zu bestellen. Nachdem die Bestellungen überhand nahmen, setzten die Scherzkekse eine "vorübergehend ausverkauft"-Meldung auf die Site. Jetzt haben sie angekündigt, die Daten, Mails und Informationen, die sie während des Projekts erhalten haben, vertraulich zu behandeln und nicht an Dritte weiterzugeben.
live long and prosper, 20InchPenis "Master of Gherkin"
Damn. That is without a doubt the most well thought out, well written thing I've read on /. in a long while. I've never posted before, but damn. You are absolutely right; the US government has definetly gone a long way towards the total abolition of privacy (Echelon, Carnivore, etc.). It's incredible people stand for it, and it's incredible that people will actually defend it. Somebody was talking about useful ways to use spare computing cycles--how about using them to work against "information-gathering" agents like Carnivore? How about fighting for our privacy online? Distributed computing could go a long way to a) overloading these systems with useless information or b) attacking them outright and taking them down. Enough work and we could defend our online privacy... Just a thought though; I hope the gestapo don't come knocking on my door for suggesting it...
I'm with Team Ars Technica Lamb Chop, which is ahead of MacAddict, Slashdot, and Microsoft, not to mention a certain well known CPU company that goes by the symbol INTC. Wanna join my team? Work units of all races, creeds, and colors are welcome...
*/
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jwz has had nothing to do with Mozilla for well over a year. His resignation notice was no April Fool's joke...
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This SETI@home-accelerator sound like really cool idea. I don't think it has any "real" use but as far as I know the SETI@home project really works quite well as it supposed to work and gives an unbelievable amount of free processing power to the project. This is the way SETI should be done, in my opinion. If you are interested, you can contribute and that's it. This piece of hardware is really interesting thing if you are enthusiast to the project. I don't think it's just taking stupid people's money. Sounds like a nice scientific toy made by some real computer science, Linux & SETI enthusiasts.
About the SETI program itself... Well, I'm not expecting any results really anyway. The way they search may really well be a wrong way and it has so many things why it might never give any results even if we were surrounded by (extraterrestial) intelligent life but I still think it's cool to anyway do this kind of project work. It's a good idea to try.
About this card again, I think it's really cool and funny thing even though it doesn't have so much real use. Of course, it's meant for people with enthusiast to this thing and some money. But even I am considering to buy one sometime. And I really don't have "extra money". We'll see...
- "I've gone beyond the truth - it's just another lie"
Wouldn't it be more helpful to donate the cost of one of these cards to SETI? The pooled money would probably go further. There'd be no personal glory though, I suppose.
From the S@H Webpage: ...Distribution of this software is prohibited."
"Restrictions:
Because the client has the linux client flashed into ROM it appears that this card violates this restriction. The restriction could have been easily gotten around by requiring the user to download the client and then flash it into ROM themselves. I don't know if they have an "agreement" with the SETI guys or not....nor do I know if the SETI guys would sort of prosecute them. (Could they? dunno.)
Most likely by the time the card would be shipped (I heard 6-8 weeks) Version 3.0 of the client would be out and the client preinstalled on the card would be obsolete.
For those of you who would like to see a Version 3.0 Preview, we have one up right now :). You can check it out here: Version 3.0 Preview
-zAmboni
-zAmboni
Team Ars Technica Lamb Chop
-zAmboni
-zAmboni
Team Ars Technica Lamb Chop
-zAmboni
-zAmboni
Team Ars Technica Lamb Chop
-zAmboni
-zAmboni
Team Ars Technica Lamb Chop
-zAmboni
-zAmboni
Team Ars Technica Lamb Chop
But whats the motivation? Lets say 4000 units are sold COD in the first 30-days. If even 1000 units are collected on at an average of $300 each thats $300,000 -- whats actually shiped could be a trojan card that isnt apparantly bogus untill after the postman leaves. Not bad money for a few smart people with nothing to loose.
Has anyone considered using a PC Field Programmable Gate Array board for SETI calculations? SETI stuff is all signal processing which could be highly paralelized on a FPGA(FPGA's are even replacing DSPs in routers these days). They're also affordable - see xilinx.com and altera.com.
>Would you ever buy anything that came from a place that looked like this?
:-)
Looks more professional than Steve Job's parent's garage.
Steve
Sounds like a great idea for a movie plot. But it seems unlikely since SETI isn't a goverment project - Congress refused to fund it.
Well if you are running a Linux distro there is this interesting little site - http://aggregate.org/KLAT2/. The SWAR 3dNOW! technology allows them to use the FPU in the graphics card and MMX to do just what you are saying. This is how they get that extra little kick. Note: I don't think running SETI is an option given all the other messages in this discussion, but it would be good for any other distributed.net type application
This card is a good idea, as it will likely lead to more PCI based special purpose multi-cpu cards for a variety of purposes.
All they do is decode SETI units. Nothing more.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
It isn't aimed at the average person. It's aimed at people with lots of money and no life 8)
So? Is it a embedded x86?
---
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com." The purpose of that site was not known. -- MSNBC 10-26-1999 on MS crack
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
But, I would MUCH rather see this technology harnessed to a wider audiance than SETI (even if you LIKE SETI, you have to admit, it's for SPARE cycles).
Porting other apps would rock, like old Fortran number crunchers for Econ. or chem. where people are spending well into 6 figures for boxes that just sit and crank out projected debt, market analysis, molecular minimization....
If it's really good, and there's a bright programmer out there, I'll bet we soon find a BioTech firm doing similar hardware for drug discovery. (Yes, graphics matters for viewing molecules, but there are still trillions of cycles out there crunching away at little numbers problems from tiny programs trying to get the best numbers).
My fear is that, someone will do something extreemly similar, propriatry, and sell it at 20x the price or more. It'd be cool to see something like this hacked and then used on the University level in science departments with limited budjets to do a much wider range of research. In fact, it's really not ne The FAQ says it's already running Linux on a Flash....
Just my two cents. And what do I know, I can't even find the price on this beast to see if it's really worth it!
CYRIX!
:)
But only during the winter.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I've just had this hilarious vision of psychology researchers across the land in academia probing the nature of the Slashdot community by injecting stimuli like this SETI accelerator announcement and watching how we react. Some vapourware is taken to heart, other vapourware is rejected out of hand -- an excellent subject for study! :-)
I wonder how many doctorates will be awarded for the analysis of such technical community communication and behaviour? More than a few, I bet.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
The funny thing about your post is that immediately below the mention about this add-in board is... a piece about the SGI that id is selling. The same piece that /. had two days ago. All these weblog-type sites steal from each other- it's quite OK. For a long time, Wired stole from /. too... they get paid, so that's different.
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
What if the extraterrestrials we detect are great a breaking codes?
You know, my MCI Pager probably has just as great a chance of detecting extraterrestrial life. I think I'll save my money and put it toward something slightly more useful.
---
seumas.com
HmmMMMmmm...The Jedi to amuse Yoda, you are.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
I don't think this is going to be the invention that turns around Ukraine's economy.
More seriously, I'd guess this is a way to grab attention for what is, after all, a PCI card that can hold a 6-low-power processor Linux parallel computer. The SETI client in flash ROM is sort of silly, but burn your own algorithms into it and you have a mighty interesting coprocessor similar to the sort of things Microway makes, for $500.
So that those of us with all these perfectly good older chips, after upgrading, can shove 'em onto a card, and use beowolf to buid a multiprocessor box for next to nothing?
*That* might be useful.
mark
That aside, can anyone shed any more light on the company or the product? Is it a scam, or are the pictures just an example of bad judgement on behalf of the marketing deptarment?
However, I'd buy one, fully decked out with 6 processors, if indeed it's not a hoax. I could put it in my already fairly tweaked was-a-P75-now-has-a-K6-2-300 which was upgraded mostly for S@h.
And if they do a USB version (since bandwidth should be pretty low) I'll chain as many off my portable as I can afford. I've got 2 spare USB ports on my 4-port hub. I'd happily drop up to A$1,000 on it now, and another A$500 every couple of months.
SAMOWAR is what we (in Bulgaria) call the big steamy russian utensils used to make tea (I guess those damn russians pronounce it [samavar]) :P
If you've ever used one of those you would know that nothing bearing this name could be fake -- the things produce so much heat it's almost impossible to stay near one...
and they make marvelous tea!
Ah yes, but what about encoding multiple mpeg-2, realvideo, quicktime and microsoft media player streams simultaneously. Doing that in realtime will tax most processors. Sometimes you want multiple processors with SIMD on each one. Don't write off special purpose hardware. Dedicated encoding boards similar to this exist, and they've got a huge advantage over using a general purpose computer.
--Shoeboy
It's cute, but it's not much good when the OS doesn't support SMP and as a result the only application that can take advantage of multiple procs is photoshop.
What'd be much nicer than a dual g4 would be a dual k7 since the k7's got an essentially equivalent fp unit, adequate SIMD extensions, twice the clock speed, has better vid card support and isn't crippled by MacOS 9.
--Shoeboy
I hate to break it to you, but most graphics cards do not have a "great FPU". In fact, many graphics cards don't have a FPU at all. You're graphics card handles rendering, which is an integer intensive process. Transformation and lighting (T&L) is a floating-point intensive process, but until very recently it was handled entirely by the main processor. Your voodoo certainly doesn't do it. There's also triangle setup, which is floating point and is usually handled by modern graphics cards, but it is secondary to rendering and I don't believe the triangle setup engines of most graphics cards are especially powerful.
Now, back to your original question. I still don't think it's possible. Yes, there are some graphics cards with powerful FPUs (like the GeForce), but they are extremely specialized pieces of hardware. They are designed to do one thing and one thing only. Even if it were possible to access the T&L engine of a GeForce directly it would require new drivers specifically designed for this purpose and writing those drivers would require intimate knowledge of how the hardware works. In other words, don't expect to see this happen unless Nvidia decides to release the complete, fully documented specs for their chip, and that's something which just isn't going to happen anytime soon.
I am not an idiot. Please use my name to email me.
"That's right, I'm quoting myself."
-Upsilon
Interesting approach. I remember when I had my Amiga someone wrote a version of Life that was faster than anybody thought was even theoretically possible from an ~7 MhZ processor.
The key was that he didn't use the processor at all. Instead, he took advantage of the blitter coprocessor (copper) and it's ability to bitmask things together and move data. Quite clever.
Yes, the current video cards have massive speciallized processors. I guess the question is that are they so specialized that they make approximations about geometry and color that would make other uses difficult?
- The slot cover on both just looks fake, and don't seem to be attached at the right angle on the card.
- In both images, I for one would like to know why there appears to be an Adaptec logo in the lower-left corner.
- How do you add processors when they appear to be packaged (I can't remember the acronym at the moment) with extremely small pins that need to be soldered to the board with an expensive rework station?
- How would a stock SETI client run on a custom-architecture missile control chip?
If these really are photos of cards that do exist, I apologize, but there are just too many technical details that are off here.BRTB
Capable of doing FFT. Thus signal processing. ....
Probably things like Discrete Cosine Transform
(DCT) thus mpeg encoding movies, encoding MP3
files on the fly
Nice idea, but they've already invested too heavily in a massively distributed array of nanobots (planted in humans' blood stream - the power supply, duh!) delivered via the back of postage stamps (along with those mind control drugs).
--
Rare Window - free your photos
from the FAQ
Q: Is this the unauthorized patch Berkley is warning not to use?
A: No. This solution is strictly hardware based. It has a standard unmodified linux text client implemented in the flash-rom of the chip. This memory was mainly used to store target and routing information. Apart from the basic drivers, the only software used is a batch-like procedure that assigns the work units to the processor.
It's like adding another computer with each processor, without having to buy all the I/O and power supply components which you dont need for SETI@home.
All valid points. On the flipside of the coin, you could be doing plain MP3 encoding- but on a not so modern CPU. Want to put some use to your 486/66 in the corner? Put an mp3 encoding card in it and you're in business.
-bugg
No.. BSD can run Linux executables without GPL violation, and so can this. Emulation is not GPL violation, Bruce. ;)
.sig: Now legally binding!
It's part of the SETI@Home plan to re-analyze the data packets. I was fortunate to hear a talk from the chief computer architect of SETI@Home and essentially the project is over. They're done mapping what they can from the telescope and the only real possibility seems to be to gain access to some in Australia (to get a view of the Southern Hemisphere). Now they are concentrating on validating the original results. The project has mapped radio data from all patches of the sky (that it can) at least 3 times or more and so they are finished. Also they are running out of tapes to store the data on. And they take up more bandwidth than any other source on the Berkeley campus...
The stupidity of the device is that the SEETI@Home project has enough computer power to process packets in faster than real-time. Should have done a 'is this a product we need' study first.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
So what purpose would this serve to the average person? The average person is really not going to want to buy a card just for this.
Two wrongs don't make a right, three lefts do!
my level 42 amazon will appreciate one of these since i forget sometimes to turn of seti@home when im playing D2 and well its messy when you walk into a room and it lags for a second until you in the middle of 8 fallen shamen on hell mode and proceed to get the equivalent of hot grits down your pants.
Chaos, Mayhem, and Destruction: Not
Ok, this is a really cool idea, but it just won't work. I really like SETI and all, but how many people are going to spend $90+ just so they can run more SETI? What /would/ work is if they found someone to donate a lot of money, and distribute these boards for free, or negligable S&H charges. I would pay $5 for one of these, even if it did take up a PCI slot. -The Tempest [ mann2 at uswest dot net ]
-The Tempest
I recent;y sat down to figure out how to build a pretty high speed clustor. I only really need to do integer math, so I was going to go for a 30 or so node clustos of Abit BP6 MB's. Not too expensive...
I began to realize, there is a lot to a PC that you don't need... so I began to look into building an embedded super computer...
I posted to "Ask Slashdot", but it never made it...
What exactly would it take to make an embedded super computer? A network of systems on a chip? A bunch of celerons tied together?
Anyone have any input? www sites?
Thanks!
Would you ever buy anything that came from a place that looked like this?
As you can see, SETI is not requiring that the @home clients to be run on the same platforms as illustrated by it's already massive list of hardware and software platforms supported; they are only requiring that the clients process data using the same procedures for scientific control and validity.
Others may be considering about what type of person would consider purchasing the $US89 and or $129 cards. Well take a look at the results of the official SETI@home survery which states that 59.09%of those running it are doing so for the reason of "finding ET for the good of humanity." As one AC has already pointed out, this type of valuable work is by "many people taken quite seriously." I suspect that many of those willing to buy will this card will consider it as a indirect donation to the SETI@home project by providing more processed data with a side possibility of fame for their efforts. Others, like myself take pride in helping humanity answer one of it's most serious questions, and don't seek gratification or fame. I don't care if I personally find anything - it's the effort that counts.
I'm also just wondering how long before someone starts over clocking these suckers to the extreme to make them even faster. Silicon Graphics (World Rank:1) has babies that can do one work unit in 2.5 hours!
PS: On another side note, I've had this signature for a month now, because I'd like to see Team Slashdot beat Microsoft (7) and MacAddict (8)!
-- "I can't tell the future, I just work there." -- The Doctor
Rather than wasting time on a Seti@home card, they should build more general purpose beowulf cards - something you can stick into your Linux box to add more grunt.
It's not a bad way of using up so called 'obsolete' lower speed processors: put them into a multiprocessor card, put it into your PCI bus, and kerbang you have more grunt.
-- Matthew - matthew.gream@pobox.com, http://matthewgream.net
Lets slap some PVFS/Network clients, some ROM/IO or other beowulf-y code on there and make Beowulf clusters @ (6 * #ofPCIslots * Nodes)!!!!
;)
-yes I already emailed them asking for this
in the early 90's there were a few companies do things like this. I seem to remember seeing stories in mags (i belive they were CAD zines) and online about multiple 486 (was the rage at the time) proc's on addin boards. I wonder what ever happenned to these companies. In theory this idea would have been great and probably have made a big impact on highend graphics workstations and servers. A card like this with 6 200mhz PPro chips (just an example could be whatever for the actual chips) would still make for a great add in board to offload distrubuted or prallel proc jobs.I think that this type of board is long overdue but something about the whole site seems fishy and the fact that the flash updates page is p/w protected brings (me and a few others who already noticed this) the potential liscense violations regarding the linux kernel.
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
Why don't we get some racks of these hooked up to the internet backbone providers? I think all ISPs should be required to have some of these. Can we get a law from the FCC on that? Mandatory SETI support!
Ok, so I'm not about to run out and buy a card just to support SETI. My electricity bill is high enough already.
Ive thought about this for a couple years also. I mean, with the current crop of video cards, like the Geforce, they already offload a lot of work from the CPU with HW T&L, so why not offload even more from the CPU by having an actualt bus type dedicated to adding riser cards that can hold more CPU's without having to buy a dual, or quad motherboard? They already designed a special video card bus, AGP, so why not make a special.. CPU Addon bus? Say, a 100, or 133 mhz bus, that runs in paralell with the current cpu for example, and have a special riser port when you can plug in a card that can hold 2 or 4 more CPU's that could work in tandem. Back on topic, using a video card, or network card, or even a sound card (yes, sound blaster live cards actualy have a very fast chip) and rewrite thier codes to perform other tasks. Hell, im surprised someone hasnt done this already!
Systems Administrator
Servu Networks
http://www.servuhome.net
Brent Jones
MacOS X is not unlike FreeBSD on the inside
It's based on NeXT Step
Which is in turn based on BSD
FreeBSD is based on 4.4 BSD of course
I hear they borrowed FreeBSD code as well
If I had a lot of money, I'd get a cube with MacOS X
NeXT Step is *good*
I probably wouldn't buy this card though
Don't get me wrong, I am all about SETI, and the space program in general
But for my money, I want processor power I can use for other stuff as well
Well, not THAT familiar, but someone used a similar concept (processors on a PCI board) here. I believe this was posted on Slashdot a few weeks ago.
Anyway, this card is a LOT cheaper.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Congress refused to fund it.
Yeah, that's what they want you to believe.
So it looks like someone is trying to make a quick buck. So what. The Idea is very intriguing especially if extended to a more flexible unit that could be used by user defined applications. From the obligatory Beowolf on a board to other more mundane uses, the idea has merit even if this particular implementation is fraudulent.
Admittedly, the set up costs for manufacturing such a beast are prohibitive, but the possibility of an old pc with all its slots loaded up with these boards each holding 6 $30 PI's or even $10 486's is just fun to contemplate.
Sometimes you want multiple processors with SIMD on each one.
Like the Pentium III?
Just another BeOS geek...
I am not some insanely good programmer, or specialist in computer hardware. But with a card of this type - which is based on vector processors that were used in cruise missles, i'm sure this computing power could be hacked into being useful for something besides SETI@home. Just wait for our friend who hacked the iOpener machine gets his hands on this. If all it does is calculate vectors, maybe it could be hacked into being something useful like AltiVec that the G4s have. Imagine having a 6chip board that gobbles away at vector graphics. :) Just wondering how well our lovely 33mhz PCI bus will be if it does get hacked into something as such.
:)
I'm a newb when it comes to posting here. Give me some slack.
I think the real question here is "how many fps can I get in q3a?"
Let me count the ways... 1) From their FAQ, the CPUs are surplus from a "PR 964 cruise missle, nato codename SAMOWAR" I get no useful hits for "SAMOWAR" on Google. Other missle names lead to something that at least mentions a missle. Also missing from http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/missile/row/ind ex.html 2) Look at the pics. These are tiny little chips, supposedly with embedded 200+ Mhz processors and 32MB ram? Oh, and a linux kernel and SETI client it all running from flash? Please. 3) Made from military surplus? Russian surplus, at that? Look at specs for military hardware some time -- it's always slow and years out of date. And that's for new (not surplus) stuff. The defense industry doesn't run on internet time. If these were 1/10th the speed with 32 *K*, I might believe it. 4) Such a project would have good hack appeal, but few (if any sales). I find it hard to believe they're trying to *sell* them.
May I suggested the new Optimal Golomb Ruler project over at Distributed.net. Searching this space can only be done exhastively, and is actually useful (in, admittedly, rarified areas). The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search is another project where the work will actually have lasting use.
Not to take away from Seti@home -- interesting project. It just became TOO popular. Ditto RC5 -- the project probably helped force the restrictions to be lifted, but it's point has been made; why spend another two years or so on it?
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Well, it looks like we'll never know:
;)
Dear Customer,
thank you for your order of SETI accelerator.
Due to the overwhelming response, we regret we can not process your order at the moment. The placed orders exceed our stock by far and further production will take about 10 weeks.
We are very sorry, but we had to cancel your order, as we can not be sure you would like to buy our product under these conditions.
If you still would like to order SETI Accelerator please place your order again and we will be glad to deliver your order as soon as possible.
We do apologize for any inconvenience.
kind regards
Andrej Schachnazarow
KrasnoConv Solutions
Looks to me like they're just cancelling all the orders and letting those people who really want to throw their money away a second chance
I thought distributed.net's purpose was to see how much can be done with people's spare processor cycles and such. Building dedicated hardware for it somewhat defeats the purpose. I mean, if you were actually working for the SETI project, you'd love to buy a ton of these, but for the average joe, why bother? Just to get first place?
I think it would be more interesting if this card was dedicated to decrypt {-- CENSORED -- } {-- CENSORED -- }{-- CENSORED -- }
The reason that I mention this is because the SETI@Home people have already pointed out that several folks have modified their clients to get more speed. Because of this the SETI people couldn't guarantee that the results would be correct so they didn't accept data from those clients.
Is there a chance the same thing could happen here?
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
Hello! This is Slashdot! April Fools 365 times a year!
Best regards,
January
When do you ever hear a statement like this anymore? My opinion of the company was just improved immensely. Cross platform hardware support is too rare, and usually incredibly political.
We need a card like this to process RC5 blocks... that would be sweet!
What sort of CPU would be best for RC5? I know it is VERY heavy on integer math... so what (cheap) CPU is the best at integer math?
Thanks.
I was thinking the other day what I'd be doing if I were a clever National Security Agency type, if I wanted to maximize my agency's ability to break codes while minimizing the budget. If I were that hypothetical NSA person, I'd be trying to set up a vast, free network of many computers working in parallel. Since not too many people would be in favor of donating their spare computer time to a super-secret government agency to do God-knows-what, I'd have to set the whole thing up with a catchy name and mission. Like the Search for Exterrestrial Intelligence. Who could be against helping E.T. phone home, or assisting Scully and Mulder find the Truth that's Out There?
..For the 6 processor version, the card is US$ 129 + 69$ for each of the other 5 processors - Thats $474 bucks for a card that ONLY does seti processing - A good investment if you want to become famous through SETI, but I think I'd rather invest in some hardware I could use for SETI and other purposes.
--------------------------------------
--------------------------------------
Vices - what I lack in originality, I make up for in volume.
At dns411.com:
domain: KRASNOCONV.COM
created: Jul 1 2000
So this domain name is about 23 days old...
last-changed: Jul 1 2000
registration-expiration: Jul 1 2001
registrant-title: Herr
registrant-firstname: Andrej
registrant-lastname: Schachnasarow
registrant-organization: KrasnoConv
registrant-street: Au 5
registrant-pcode: 94140
registrant-city: Ering
registrant-ccode: DE
Which is Germany, isn't it..?
registrant-phone: +49 8573 12345
Is there anything funny about the phone number, or... nah!
registrant-email: KrasnoConv@mail.ru
And the registrant is using a maildrop in Russia..
From the website's "Company Info" page:
"KrasnoConv solutions are a privately owned company, established 1995, located in Krasnokutovka, Ucraine."
There is no "Krasnokutovka" in the index of the National Geographic Atlas of the World, Revised Sixth Edition, 1996. The closest matches are "Krasnokamsk" and "Krasnoleninskiy"...
Food for thought...
I'll let you draw your own conclusions...
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
SHould be possible. I remember a ray-tracer written to run inside an Apple Laserwriter. At the time it was the fastest processor many people had.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Another big question is the CPU. What the hell kind of CPU is MP-105-D? An Altavista search borught NOTHING on that. First of all, the Linux kernel would have to run on it. But the biggie is: the SETI@home client would have to be available for it, since that is not available as binary. That client is only available for a few well known architectures. The only way this is possible is if it is X86 compatible. Second, the bus looks totally fake. There's no way you can put 6 processors each with 200+ lines that close together with no interconnection logic. Furthermore, you would need some way to multiplex the flash memory since it's shared, and presumably doesn't have 6 read ports. There is no glue logic on this. It would have to be a custom ASIC, and there's no way they could sell it that cheap. Third, I don't see anything resembling a flash part on the board. Yes, this definitely looks like a fake.
"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
-- Article 12 Universal Declaration of Human Rights
It's not about passwording a BIOS to keep the kids off your computer while you're away at work. It's not about keeping skr1pt kiddiez out of your box--for that, use firewalls. It's about invasion of privacy. It's about freedom. It's about the private self. It's about the fact that there are people and organizations and governments which don't believe a man's private papers are private any more. It's about the right to have that privacy, and the absolute peace of mind that comes when you've got it.
See, there used to be this idea in democracies that a man had a fundamental human right to think whatever he wants and write whatever he wants, and that as long as it was kept private such information was personal and couldn't even be used against him in Court. A man's diaries and journals and such weren't even admissable as evidence at trial--it was tainted, because he had a right to think and write privately for his own contemplation. But that went away late in the last century/early in this century, in almost all countries. Your diaries, your private thoughts and reflections, were no longer private, could be used against you and now even subpoenaed.
Some people don't consider this a huge loss. Others consider it a huge loss, of something fundamental. Do you know why there's no explicit "right to privacy" in the U.S. Bill of Rights? Because none of the founding fathers ever thought that it could be taken away, it was such a fundamental aspect of the Common Law. Freedom of the press, the right to assemble, the right to bear arms--all the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights had been taken away by the British at one point or another, but never did they go so low as to use a colonist's own private diaries and thoughts against him at trial. It was so incredibly fundamental. The Fourth Amendment only begins to touch upon this, but unfortunately didn't fully flesh out a "right to privacy" and is tody construed by the Court to mean that as long as the cops have a warrant they can take any damned thing they want to even if it's something the Founding Fathers would have found inviolable, like one's own journals.
Fast forward two centuries, and this fundamental right has disappeared. If you are accused of anything, or even if you're just a material witness, your journals and papers can be subpoenaed and paraded out before the world. Records of Monica Lewinsky's book purchases, and her private correspondence, taken and abused and paraded before the public. People's hard drives have been either confiscated or imaged by the authorities for things as petty as possibly having conspired to call in sick during an airline sick-out. Would you want your hard drive imaged and inspected because you called in sick? Or would you want it imaged or confiscated for having said something negative about a company in an online forum, so that now you're being sued for libel for making an honest and true comment about some behemoth corporation? It's happened and is happening. You don't have to be a terrorist or a child pornographer or a seditionist any more to have the contents of your hard drive made public any more. these days you can be anyone. Are you aware of the fact that people who've worked for Consumer Reports have had their computers searched because a big powerful company filed a libel suit against them, hmmm? My computer is my own goddamned business, and what I write or store here is private. PERIOD. It's a fundamental human right to privacy which I, and you, and every humanfuckingbeing has, so call me a "fool" all you like, but you're the fucking fool for not wanting every bit of privacy and humanity which governments and corporations are taking away. You find no use for encrypted systems? Fine. But some of us are actually interested in preserving our rights and we aren't fools for that. The one thing we do have left, at least in the U.S., is a Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate ourselves, so with an encrypted system we could just say, when the key is demanded, "On advice of counsel I decline to answer, on the grounds that such an answer may incriminate me." The only way they could possibly get around that is by granting you full immunity from all charges relating to whatever may be on your system, so crypto is an effective way to protect yourself if you should ever say something a corporation or the government doesn't like. There are many programs to encrypt your hard drives, but you can't effectively encrypt your boot drive, and you can't encrypt swap without major overhead (another reason a yhardware card would be great); there are ways in which software encryption mechanisms can fuck up and reveal your key or compromising info about your key, and your boot drive may also provide fodder for social engineering or provide plaintext which you haven't yet encrypted; so, a hardware card which provides a completely encrypted system with little overhead would be the ideal. These days, we unfortunately can use the term "American dissidents" almost as truthfully as we could say "Chinese dissidents".
That isn't even taking into consideration the needs of individuals in other countries. So stop calling people who want privacy fools, and start appreciating the rights which we should all hold dear. A few more quotes to bolster the point:
"The real aim of current policy is to ensure the continued effectiveness of US information warfare assets against individuals, businesses and governments in Europe and elsewhere"
-- Ross Anderson
"As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy."
-- Christopher Dawson, The Judgment of Nations, 1942
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..."
-- The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
"No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session."
-- Judge Gideon J. Tucker, 1866
"The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the constitutional rights secure."
-- Albert Einstein
"You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence."
--Charles Austin Beard, 1874 - 1948
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
This is clearly aimed at Geeks-with-Cash, not at the average compuser. If I actually had any money, I'd buy one. I don't even run the Seti client, I do the distributed.net stuff, but this thing is just so cool that I'd definitely buy one if I could. After all, talk about bragging rights:
"Hey Bob, did you hear about that Seti project where people use their computers to help search for extraterrestrial radio signals?"
"Yup. Pretty cool, eh?"
"Yeah, I decided to go ahead and install it on my workstation. Seems like a great project for a geek to help out."
"Yeah, I installed a special multiprocessor vector processing unit in my computer to work on Seti all the time; it runs on a PCI card, and beats the hell out of a P!!! 500 even though it doesn't use any of my CPU's cycles to do the work, it's all in hardware. Took these military surplus vector processors and..."
Now, that's some nice geek bragging rights, my friend. Talk about exotic hardware. I just wish they'd do something like this for distributed.net, since there have to be a few embedded chips which would handle crypto-cracking pretty well.
That brings me to my #1 desire in an exotic PCI card: hardware-based encryption. I want a card with an embedded processor(s) to handle a very strong combination of crypto specifically designed for encrypting hard drives. Wouldn't it be amazing to have a PCI card which registers to your BIOS as the primary hard disk controller, and then prompts for password information before bringing up a boot menu allowing access to your real hard drives and operating system(s)? Imagine, with a dedicated card like that the entire system could be encrypted with almost no overhead, since the card would handle all decryption/encryption and leave the main CPU(s) free. The only slow down on such a system would be the slight delay in routing I/O calls through the card, but I'm sure it's technically feasible to do such a thing. IBM does something similar in the hardware of some of its big-$$$ RISC systems. Now, a card like *that* would be sweet, and if implemented right with good drivers virtually fool-proof.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
I've had a question about this for a while, and none of my friends can seem to answer it. So, I'm going to let the Slashdot give it a shot.
Is there any way to use additional processors or co-processors on a PC (x86) to run SETI @ Home clients?
For example, I have a Voodoo 2 (12 Megs of RAM) in my Linux box. Would there be some way to write a SETI client that uses the Voodoo's processors to run additional SETI clients/threads? This situation is pefect because unless I'm using a 3D program (Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, etc) the Voodoo is doing nothing.
The only reason I ask this question is because computers do math, it's a fact, just math all of the time. Why not have the SETI client use some of the great FPU (Floating Point Unit) on the graphics processors of a Voodoo card? Have the Voodoo do it's math on the Voodoo's processors rather than the PC's CPU.
Also, I don't see why this won't work for other things besides Voodoo cards. Any card that's strictly 3D, some NICs have a small co-processor for checksumming, or even a way to set the prioroity on the SETI client using a 2D/3D card (so 2D performance doesn't suffer when the user is using normal windowed applications).
1 - 6 processors on one card, yet there's no heatsink? Embedded processors these things may be, but they still produce heat, and I'd imagine 6 of them would produce sufficient heat for them to start cooking each other.
:)
2 - The Technical Specs say that there is 32Mb of onboard memory PER PROCESSOR. This means, on the 6 processor board there's 192Mb RAM! Judging by the pictures on the site, there is NO WAY you'd fit that much RAM on a card that size.
3 - Those pictures. I'm a dab hand at Photoshop, and whoever made those pictures isn't.
4 - The "upgradeable" board - according to the site you can buy a 6 processor board, and add on as many processors as you like, yourself. A stark contrast from the pictures, which clearly show that these chips are surface mounted, and not slottable.
5 - The "Beta Test" bit. According to their beta-test page, they'll give you one of these boards for FREE, if you offer to beta test for them. This doesn't sound like a kosher company to me! Imagine if nVidia said, "hey, here's our new Super-Whammo-HForce GTS 2000 Pro, it retails for $800, but we'd like you to 'beta-test' it for free!".
If this does turn out to be a geniune product, then the boys at Krasnoconv need to find a decent marketing agency - at the moment they're looking like just one step above totl.net's Spudserver!
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
-- js.
A quick search of "Samowar" or "PR-964" didn't turn up much on Google, nor on the Federation of American Scientists, one of the most respected military analysis sites on the Internet. Where would they get the documentation for a military surplus processor? Why not the scads of other cheap embedded, well known, processors out there like ARM, i960? I know the Eastern European nations are hard for cash and selling say MiG's and Flankers but this is an odd way to make money :)
Anyways, why would anyone want such a thing? I love seti@home (running at work, our research lab, total about 22 machines) as much as anyone else, but I wouldn't buy specialized hardware for the thing...
--Calum
Bleh.
I was just wondering, since the Seti@Home dudes are always talking about how they need to keep the source code under control to keep any semblance of scientific integrity, something which I think makes sense, does the porting of the block cruncher to other systems affect this goal at all?
For example, if there's a rounding error in one of the floating point libraries for whatever OS you're compiling for, let's just take the common example of a 6 processor embedded PCI card, wouldn't that invalidate the results from that computer as much as the Seti@Home source being modified?
Hotnutz.com - Funny
Now we can all analyze redundant data packets six times faster! :-)
Sometimes I wish there were a distributed computing project out there that I actually cared about. Maybe we should start a project to scan the space of all 2MB Linux ELF executables until we find one that corresponds to a fast, stable, standards-compliant web browser. The funny thing is, that might actually take less time than Mozilla...
Looks like one to me. The pictures of the boards for instance, the 6 processor version the chips look like they are vut and pasted on top of all the other chips on the circuit board. The FAQ recommends you by the single processor version and then fill the slots up with the required number of processors to your preference. There are no slots! It runs the Linux Client? Since when was linux ported to this embedded processor of the US Militaries, and where is the source? And when was the Seti client ported to this platform. Looks like a hoax to me. At best it's a GPL violation as there is no source for the linux kernel modifications from the port.