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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.
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
There are more demanding signal processing tasks than MP3 encoding, hard as it is to belive. Some of them might even be of interst to the home user. For instance, technical analysis of the stock market (technical analysis is using past history to predict future performance, while fundamental analyis is using financial information to do the same). Much of the work in thecnical analysis is doing FFTs of the historical data, and the ability to churn through it quickly can be very important.
Witness that Wall Street is on of the biggest consumers of supercomputing in the world. While that kind of power (and the algorithms to exploit it) are out of the reach of individuals, I know a guy who has done some stuff that can be cranked through in several hours on a consumer PC...
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.
SETI at Home was designed so the Average Joe could contribute to the project in their spare time, not to prove a point about the ability of distributed computing.
However, there are some of us who want to do more than throw scraps of processor time at the project. We want to cross the line and more actively contribute and do something a little extra because we believe in it and we want to push it even the smallest bit forward.
We may never live to see anything come of it. But just doing what we do may make it happen sooner, if it ever does.
That's good enough for me.
"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.