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Seti@Home Bandwidth Problems
reflexreaction writes: "With so many of the /. users actively using and supporting Seti@home, many of you have realized that in the last couple of weeks that Seti has had some serious problems receiving completed data and getting new data to process from its 3 million members because of network bandwidth problems. All the gritty details are here. The article details some things that users can do to alleviate some of the problems including connecting during off hours and downloading more than unit than once using programs like SetiQueue for PC and Seti Unit Manager for Mac. Donations are also accepted. There is also a plea for bandwidth donations. It will be truly unfortunate if this page becomes /.ted without benefit from /. users."
There goes whatever remaining bandwidth they had...
And how much bandwidth are they using up hosting these gritty details?
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
Another solution to Seti@home's bandwidth problems is for the clients to do something more useful. Like cure cancer.
2/6/2002
The problem
When your SETI@home screensaver downloads a work unit, the data flows from a server in our laboratory, through the University of California at Berkeley campus network, and through a connection to the commercial Internet. This connection is shared by all UCB Internet users - departmental web and FTP sites, email, SETI@home, and so on. The University pays for bandwidth on this connection; it is currently buying 70 megabits per second (Mbps). The student residence hall have a separate 40 Mbps connection.
Until recently, SETI@home was given about 25 Mbps, and the remaining 45 Mbps was shared by the rest of campus. But starting last month (January 2002) the bandwidth used by the rest of campus increased in an unexpected and unexplained way. During peak periods the demand now exceeds 70 Mbps. If SETI@home continued to use 25 Mbps, the performance of all other outgoing traffic would suffer.
The UCB network administrators have worked hard to balance the bandwidth needs of SETI@home and the rest of campus. Currently, SETI@home traffic is given lower priority than other traffic. During peak periods (typically 10 AM - 10 PM PST) SETI@home averages 6 Mbps, and sometimes gets no bandwidth. During non-peak periods SETI@home gets as much as 50 Mbps.
When SETI@home is not getting enough bandwidth, our data server backs up - all of its processes are waiting to send data, and it can't accept new connections. During these periods, your screensaver will get report that it "can't connect to server".
The impact on our overall computing rate is significant but not too serious - the rate has dropped about 25%. But many SETI@home users are unhappy that their computers are sitting idle for many hours, waiting for data. We share this unhappiness, and are working to solve the problem.
Short-term solutions
We're working on several short-term solutions:
Increase the bandwidth of UCB's network connection. We hope to "expand the pipe" by about 10 Mbps - enough to ease, but not eliminate, the crisis. The issue is money - bandwidth costs about $300 a month per megabit, and neither SETI@home nor the university has budgeted for this cost.
Send data more efficiently. Currently work units are encoded as text. By sending them in binary, we can shrink them by about 25%. (Note: data compression isn't effective for our data, which is primarily random noise). This change will require a new version of the client software. Increase the amount of computation per work unit. Doubling the CPU time per work unit - by looking at more chirp rates, for example - will reduce bandwidth by 50%. There is scientific justification for doing this, although the law of diminishing returns applies. This will also require a new version of the client software. Long-term solutions
The long-term solution is to allow work units to be sent from servers outside UC Berkeley. This could be done, for example, by sending work units to servers at organizations - companies and universities - that are willing to donate part of their outgoing network bandwidth to SETI@home. In addition to solving the current problem, this could greatly increase our overall data capacity, enabling us to search for ET signals in a wider frequency band.
This solution represents a significant change to our software; we will use this approach in our next-generation software. We are seeking funding to develop this software, and it won't be ready for at least 6 months.
What you can do There are a couple of things you can do to keep your computers busy processing SETI@home data:
If you connect manually (e.g., over a modem) try connecting during off hours (23:00 to 3:00 Pacific Standard Time, or 7:00 to 11:00 UT). You can check the Server status page to see if we're currently dropping connections. Download more than one work unit when you connect. This can be done manually, or by automated workunit caching software. Example programs include SetiQueue for Windows, or Seti Unit Manager for Macintosh. For more information about other SETI@home add-ons see our links page.
To help us achieve a short-term solution, you can help in two ways:
Donate to SETI@home. This will enable us to buy network bandwidth. Help us find "bandwidth sponsors". We hope that a major commercial ISP might donate bandwidth to UC Berkeley to help SETI@home. If you work for, or have contacts in, such a company, please contact us.
About the current bandwidth problems
She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.
If their BW problems stem from the fact that the rest of the campus has experienced a "mysterious" increase in network traffic, a good start may be to block access on ports used by popular file sharing programs. I'll bet that this is where a lot of the BW demand is coming from since the increase happened at the beginning of a new semester.
---
I didn't want to leave this space blank.
Distributed.net just uses a network of proxies, are the SETI people idiots or did they just not have the forethought that the distributed.net people had?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
"But starting last month (January 2002) the bandwidth used by the rest of campus increased in an unexpected and unexplained way."
Doh. I was looking for the gritty details. Massive DDOS bot invasion? SNMP exploit? Warez? Rogue Quake III servers? Son of Napster? Backhoe dug up a cable? There has to be at least an educated guess as to where the bandwidth is going.
I think the network admins at UC Berkeley are just cutting back on Seti, but don't want to admit it publicly. Bad press and all.
null sig
"... But starting last month (January 2002) the bandwidth used by the rest of campus increased in an unexpected and unexplained way. During peak periods the demand now exceeds 70 Mbps. ..."
Student goes home for Xmas. Student gets new Windows XP box. Student chats like a 20-something adult using built-in chat SW.
Bandwidth dissapears Jan 03, 2002.
Go ask the little green men if they could perhaps borrow some bandwith =)
Possibly of related interest, the is an article on Internet Scale Operating Systems in the newest Scientific American.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
You have to give the Set@Home Team their props for making a system thats scaleable and able to handle the user load from the first 100,000 users to the now 3,000,000.
I've always believed the bottleneck in Distributed Computing was the Data Packets being sent/recieved because the demand will grow exponentially the more users you aquire.
Most applications seem to remidy this problem by limiting the data packet sizes from 5 - 15k compressed packets. This has worked for projects like Distributed.net.
I can only forsee the future of this problem being the same that plagues Video Card Chipsets, which is insted of re-engineering the device to make a more robust and lower overhead solution, they'll just throw a bigger pipe on the line (much like Memory Bandwidth demand).
But again, my respect goes out to the Seti@Home team and their sponsors for architecting a technological data mining marvel.
Think about it. IF there are aliens who fly around the universe with SUPERIOR technology - they'd have the means to contact us.... and when they DO - we'll know it.
I'm not trying to troll or bait a flame war - I'm just questioning the feasibility and practicality of SETI@home.
There must be OTHER projects to lend CPU cycles to. I know that Distributed.net has projects that are looking to create stronger encryption. And at my last job, a co-worker had a screen saver program that used his spare cpu cycles to work on cancer research.
SURE - it'd be cool to have the PC that decoded the first real ET message - but what are the chances of doing so?
Would it be more practical/feasible to donate those spare cpu cycles elsewhere???
[Connection closed by foreign host]
they're just now figuring out that there's not much money to be made looking for aliens? :-)
I'm not sure whether or not this is a good thing or a bad thing. Lemme elaborate.
Disclamer: I have never been part of SETI@home; I feel that statistically it's a collossal waste of time. I've been part of both the GIMPS project and the distributed.net RC5-64 projects for about four years now. I've got the Kevlar body armor halfway on.
The good, I guess, is that there's such a collossal interest in this. I mean, hell, if KzAplOcQQ and boB are sharing the Encyclopaedia Galactica (or the Hitchikers' Guide, whatever) over radio waves, then we'll eventually find it hopefully in something that resembles paEr Unicode.
However, I see a great many downsides to this.
First off, if the aforementioned theoretical KzAplocQQ and boB of the paEr race have to use radio waves, then there's a pretty good chance they haven't been able to go superphotonic, in which case we're going to have a long wait before we can even think of going to their New York and flipping them the left tentacle.
Secondly, how will we be able to decode a xenic dataset, much less their language? I mean, what if they can transmit trits or quaytes while we're looking for bits or bytes? How do we know what a newline would appear? Hell, do we even know if it would even be necessary? And what about the characters? What if the Chinese language is easier to interpret than paEr?
Third, there are much better uses of free cycles, at least fiscally. GIMPS will provide a hundred kilobucks to the first person to successfully find a ten megadigit Mersenne prime. distributed.net provides a two kilobuck prize and a large donation to the FSF, EFF, or other worthy charities. Even the commercial distributed computing projects at least pay for the use of your rig.
(PS: paEr is a theoretical name for a xenic (alien) species, contrived from randomly entering characters on the number pad. KzAplocQQ is an unpronouncable name, unless you're lucky or high. boB just sounds funny.)
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
When SETI@Home first started, they were having quite a difficult time with people resubmitting completed work units and forged results in order to skew their group statistics. To keep things honest, they resend the same work unit to more than one system and compare the results.
This has to be a difficult balancing act for them; while they don't give details about the exact nature of the doublechecking (so that people don't try to bypass it), this has to be eating the bandwidth for them.
Maybe a better solution is not to increase bandwidth but to encrypt the data to prevent tampering?
"It remains to be seen if the human brain is powerful enough to solve the problems it has created." Dr. Richard Wallace
In a way, this hurdle could prove a boon, by forcing the SETI@home developers to make their system more efficient.
Necessity is, after all, the mother of invention.
As their own statement points out, two of the short-term solutions include making the data sent out more efficient (binary instead of text) and letting each node do more computation.
SETI@home was originally developed to male up for the shortcomings of processing power of any single computer. To solve the problem, they took a bit of a free ride on networking bandwidth to distribute the problem.
Now their success is also forcing them to be more efficient when it comes to network bandwidth, as well as processor, utilization.
So this forced economy will hopefully make the system more efficient through improvement of the system.
Pie-in-the-sky and we have all the computing power and bandwidth we need, but then who would have an incentive to innovate?
Ultimately, SETI@home's legacy will probably have less to do with discoveries of extraterrestrial intelligence and more to do with the evolution of better computing techniques!
evanchik.net
I would have expected UC Berkeley to have a higher bandwidth connection to the Internet.
Internet2's goal is 1Tbps connections -- That's faster than 70Mbps by over 10^5. Pretty funny.
Or you can read the Slashdot article referencing that same SciAm article here.
Dumbass. But then, what else would one expect when you have as stupid a sig as that. Why don't you actually think for yourself rather than blindly believe the various nutcases who find any excuse for believing Bush is "illegitimate".
...I don't run SETI@home. It's my understanding that the SETI@home project now provides more processing power than they really need, as they have not optimized the client and do not support multiple processors.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
The Suffix "@Home" seems to be unlucky lately... They should unload their network to a lesser company and call it the same.
http://www.linkdj.net/
IF there are aliens who fly around the universe with SUPERIOR technology - they'd have the means to contact us.... and when they DO - we'll know it.
1) The point isn't necessarily to find aliens with, as you described it "SUPERIOR technology", but any sign of intellegent life. I.e. any race that has sufficent technology to emit a signal capable of reaching earth (and that limitation only because we currently can't do much better).
they'd have the means to contact us
2) What do you base this upon? (Aside from SciFi movies?) We simply don't know if it's possible at all or even how long it would take a civilization to reach that point. We've had radio for over 100 years, and we don't know how to contact other alien civilizations. How do we know it won't be another 10,000 years until we can.
Personally, I find it an excellent use of my spare cpu cycles. You're free to take yours where you wish.
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
"IF there are aliens who fly around the universe with SUPERIOR technology - they'd have the means to contact us"
What if they're at the same level as we are? Then they're hard to find, easy to lose in the background noise, and may not even realize we're looking for them.
"Would it be more practical/feasible to donate those spare cpu cycles elsewhere???"
Maybe, but it will be limited. The cancer research screen saver you mentioned won't work on anything truly meaningful - after all, there's money in cancer research and nothing sensitive will be allowed out like that. A cure for any type of cancer will be worth billions to the lab that puts it together. They won't risk a competitor installing a screen saver and starting to sift data...
Other applications for distributed computing that start to involve money end up with the same problem - people don't want to donate their electricity & time so someone else can get rich, and I haven't seen any for-profit distributed program that would let me break even on the electricity cost to run the client 24/7.
So non-commercial stuff like SETI or crack the latest encryption scheme will always be the ones most successful. Anyway, the SETI program is starting to spin off other pure science radio astronomy uses for the data, so it's not just little green men anymore.
null sig
"she says i'm lousy conversation. as if that's supposed to help."
ha ha... I think they're swamped because Drudgereport.com is pointing everyone to read this article!! : U.C. Berkeley students watched as instructor had sex at strip club, participated in orgy...
Someone tell those guys at Berkeley to stop downloading so much freakin' PR0N!!!
I bet that by creating a campus-wide matching system (as in matching boys and girls), and organizing free movie nights, they would solve their bandwidth problems. But this solution is probably too indirect for their taste.
.. I've been donating $20 a month to SETI for years.. jump on the bandwagon and help out. You even get nifty promotional materials and a membership "status" for various levels of annual donations.
It will be truly unfortunate if this page becomes /.ted without benefit from /. users.
/. readers are apt to do, they should donate their bandwidth resources to this project."
Please tell me I'm misinterpreting this. To me, it reads like, "It'll really be bad, if their site gets slashdotted, and then you slashdot users don't give anything back."
Honestly, if that doesn't sound like sniveling for one's entitlements, I dunno what does.
"Here, I'll unwittingly subject Seti@Home to 50x its normal traffic. And because all those people chose to visit the link that I posted, as
What a feckin' guilt trip.
Seriously - I shut off all my machines seti@home search and my electric bill dropped 10$ and I'm not kidding anyone in the slightest.
What is the point anyhow? I mean this is collectively costing them (probably) billions of dollars a month to do this - between everyone's increased power bill. And seriously - what are the chances that their algorithm are going to find something worthwhile?
Need I say more? Even my web browser can handle gzip...
Aside from that : WHY can't SETI get the TINY amount of cash it needs to handle this problem?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
Unfortunatly, Berkley has two pipes, one for the Residence halls and one for the rest of campus. It seems odd that they can't figure out where all the data is coming from, but I don't think its students in the dorms. Its possible that someone is running a public proxy or an ftp on their dept. network, but you'd think a renowned computer school like Berkley could afford staff and software that could figure the simple stuff out.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
The one thing that interested me about the blurb from the Seti@Home site that was linked from this article was the following quote:
l la-rc.pdf for a great discussion on the perils of the flaws in the first generation Gnutella protocol).
> But starting last month (January 2002) the
> bandwidth used by the rest of campus increased in
> an unexpected and unexplained way.
I wonder if this isn't a byproduct of the intense bandwidth issues associated with peer to peer apps like Gnutella and Morpheus, popular music "sharing" applications that seem to get a bit of use on college grounds nationwide. I'd guess (if I had to; definitely talking out ye old arse here) the reason bandwidth usage wasn't noticed sooner is that many places (my place of work included -- I'm a gov't contractor) are placing a pretty high priority on "Homeland Security", including taking a fresh look at internet usage.
These things aren't exactly bandwidth friendly (see http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~matei/PAPERS/gnute
Anyhow, that's what came to mind when I read the blurb. I think their best short term solution might be to chase down unattended Gnutella and Morpheus/KaZaA applications and get back that bandwidth.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
Why even bother their servers at all? SETI should wait until we have our own world's problems figured out. Please visit Folding@Home or Genome@Home for two ways you can help solve actual problems. If solving geeky problems is more your style, visit d.net.
Go, do it now, I swear you'll feel all warm and fuzzy.
Another good caching program for SETI@Home is SETIMonitor and can be found at: http://www.itcompagniet.no/setimon/
This problem is probably caused by the excessive amounts of pr0n that are being hosted on their servers. I mean, you didn't think that those big-ass satelite dishes were used to pick up radio signals did you??? I bet that they can pick up some massive pr0n with those things....
If SETI has more people contributing than can it can handle b/c of its bandwidth limitations, I'd like to ask our /. friends to consider using an alternative program. There are many distributed network programs out there to choose from. This may be off-topic, but it concerns me that people are using valuable CPU cycles on finding alien radio messages instead of contributing towards real-world applications which can benifit humanity today such as the Drug Design Optimization Lab from Sengent. It, for example, can be used to find drugs to treat and perhaps cure diseases such as ANTHRAX, SMALLPOX, and EBOLA right now, and in the future... perhaps botulism, plague, and maybe even AIDS. Not that I don't find Seti@home fascinating, and I believe it's a worthy cause for wasted CPU cycles, but if they're maxed out... why not contribute to another cause such as one that will help fight diseases? I used to contribute to distributed.net, but now I use sengent's DDOL -- REAL antivirus software. (can be found at www.sengent.com) A list of many of the other possible clients for other projects can be found at http://www.aspenleaf.com/distributed/distrib-proje cts.html
These bandwidth problems aren't technical, they're political. We're getting too close, so they're shutting us down.
* * Always question "the National Interest" - 9 times out of 10 it is a cover for evil
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They have bandwidth problems, and you post this? Could be me, but I think a slashdotting isn't going to help the issue. Just my .02
Brian
Why stop at Gnome and KDE.
Why can't we make the theme engine work for java, tk, fltk, Motif(Choose any free implementation), Athena, Xaw, Etc. Providing a unified look, although not always a unified feel for all the applicationns.
I get the feeling that KDE theming is more advanced so should be used as the starting point for the theming engine. I believe KDE themes are based on replacable theme engines(libraries) instead of images sets, different drawing libraries allow a large number of color combinations to be choosen, and be applied to almost any theme. Correct me if I am wrong on this points
There should be a choice of C or C++ (Maybe even Java) theme libraries. This will make both C and C++ programmers happy.
This way we can have a consistent look without being forced to use the same languages, or libraries. After having a unified theme, further integration such as file dialogs, drag and drop, file system abstraction can be open to discussion.
This isn't good, how's ET ever gonna phone home now???
Question everything that you've accepted without thinking.
(Apparently random noise doesnt compress?)
The random noise is ASCII-armored. Random noise in a hexadecimal encoding will compress 2:1 with just Huffman entropy coding, which is the last step of gzip's Deflate algorithm.
Will I retire or break 10K?
That's exactly why that distributed system from Microsoft wouldn't work. We don't have the bandwidth yet... Or maybe it's just DivX sharing revolution :-)
Your one of the dumb people who thinks that even if we bet the huge odds, and recieved something from another civilization, that we could talk to them.
Its three light years to the nearest star
We already have looked at most of the close stars, so that leaves millions of years of travel time for the signals from anything that seti might find.
Why not put it into something useful, rather than chasing something pointless like seti.
SETI@home data is processed on untrusted client hardware. There is no way to prevent somebody with a debugger from messing around with an application's internals while it's decrypting or encrypting work units. The SSSCA will outlaw computers that kernel-level debuggers can run on, but is that a good thing?
Will I retire or break 10K?
At any rate Seti doesn't use any extra power if your computer is running anyways since a CPU is always at 100% anyways (cept instead of SETI data it is doing Idle Loop calcs).
Not necessarily. Some operating systems call a special instruction when they hit the idle loop. This instruction tells the processor to go to sleep until the timer or a device signals an interrupt to the CPU. I'm sure Windows 98 and 98se do that; my laptop fan runs less often when I run dnetc than when I run only the system idle process.
Will I retire or break 10K?
whoever approved this with the links is an idiot! so is whoever submitted the article!
Sure, lets slashdot someone who is having bandwidth problems already..
i hate pansy republicans
While technically, SETI is a very cool project and it has accomplished a great deal... I hope they aren't successful for at least the next 200-1000 years.
Humanity simply isn't ready to handle the acknowledgment of another (exceedingly) intelligent species. It would throw off our entire social development. Hopefully the other species out there know this and are preventing earth from receiving their radio signals.
Call me crazy, but I'd guess that demand on seti's servers grows linearly with the number of users.
However, the number of users grows exponentially with respect to time. Grandparent specified only that "the demand will grow exponentially" and that it will increase as the number of users increases. A colloquial meaning of "grow exponentially" is to grow following the early exponential-like stages of a logistic model, a model designed to model the spread of information such as a web site URL or a Warhol worm.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'm currently trying to run Seti@Home and the UD Cancer Cure program but it's not going well... Seti won't give up any cycles to UD.... and in light of this I'll be shutting down Seti for a while.
But what I really wish was created was a single program which all other tasks of this nature could be setup as plug-in's.... each plug-in getting all the unused cycles until it completes a unit and then the next plug-in get's it's turn... maybe even be able to decide how you want to skew the processings:
5 Seti@ Home units, then 12 UD units, 4 Folding@Home, etc....
There are a lot of projects out there I'd like to help with.... if only they'd play nice...
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
So it sounds like all they need to do is ban students from running Windows XP ("Do you want to download a patch? How 'bout a passport account? You know you want one. All your friends are getting them. And I've got another security update for you...what'd you say? Come on, give it a try. The first one's free you know..." etc. etc. That's probably 80% of the bandwidth right there.)
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Note for the humour impaired...oh, what's the use.
If we make contact with ET, he will surely tell us how to cure all those deseases, No?
Uh, do you really thing that ET is going to have some advice on curing human diseases like Alzeihmers, cancer, or Anthrax?
The only thing that extraterrestrials will be able to tell us about medicine is how to get rid of intergalactic genital warts.
It's == It Is
Its == possessive version of 'it'
The rules of the apostrophe for it/its/it's are a special case and do not follow "Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots."
</troll>
That's also why Microsoft's Distributed OS wouldn't work out...
there is no way that the millions of people out there are going to be able to DL and get the various queue programs working correctly.
we all need to think about these things AHEAD of time and design our distributed applications to either be auto updated (where we can set a new default number of units of work).
To quote: "SetiQueue for PC and Seti Unit Manager for Mac."
Please... guys... as an author (read: someone with a vested interest in the English language) and a long-time major geek, I am really irked by this sort of thing. I have come to expect that newbie-types can and almost always will confuse the terms "Mac OS" and "Mac", and the terms "Windows" and "PC", but this is SlashDot.
I don't mean to be ridiculously anal here, but I do wish to stick up for correct usage of technical terms and names. "Mac" and "PC" are hardware architectures. Unless your copy of SetiWhatzit is written to actually be its own BOOTLOADER (that is, unless it IS the operating system), you do not write it for the hardware. You write it for the operating system.
Mac OS is written for the Mac.
Kaleidoscope, Fetch, Office '98, Apple/Clarisworks, etc. are written for Mac OS.
Windows is written for the PC.
(insert name of any given Windows program) is written for Windows.
The OS sits atop the hardware and the programs sit atop the OS. Therefore it is incorrect to say something like "This-or-that program for Mac, and that-or-this program for PC".
To illustrate just how this is blatantly incorrect (and I am not really just being nitpicky after all)-- consider this one:
The program cited in this story as being for "PC", would not run on MY PC, despite the fact that it is a perfectly decent, high-quality PC. Why? Simple-- it runs Linux. This program isn't really for the "PC" at all! It is for Windows. Big difference.
The program cited in this story as being for "Mac" would not run on many Macs I have owned in the past. Why? Since my Macs also ran Linux. And occasionally NetBSD. Perfectly good Macs, but they didn't run Mac OS. This program, likewise, is not for the "Mac". It is for Mac OS. Also a big difference.
I don't like having to dredge up this sort of nitpicky nonsense, but honestly, people, we're SlashDot. We should know that not every "PC" runs Windows, and not every "Mac" runs Mac OS. If any population should know this, it's us.
As a proud user of Debian GNU/Linux on both the PC and Mac (68K and PowerPC) platforms, I am very upset that people are further minimizing any and all alternative operating systems (and encouraging people to think that Microsoft and Apple are all that exists) by saying "for PC" when they mean "for Windows", and "for the Mac" when they mean "for Mac OS". Please, let's refrain from this sort of misleading? We may not be able to stop the slow monopolization of all things digital, but we sure as heck can at least try to slow its progress a tiny bit by promoting technical knowledge and understanding of computer terminology.
--Jessica
------------------------------------------- Just Say no to Windows!
you fucking dunce, i believe in aliens just about as much as i believe that my dick, furious from all the masturbation, will turn around and bite my head off.
Perhaps not.
Prehaps ET decides we aren't worth the trouble and saves us from our suffering by harvesting the human race to make Alien Powerbar nutritional suppliments. Bet you never thought of that, didja??
--
see here
JESUS!
Sounds like they could use some mirror sites for work units. Distribution could either be done late a night or by sneakernet.
Also, the big "work_unit.sah" file appears to have most of its content in a uuencoded-type of format, which makes it 33% larger than its binary equivalent. Also, I don't know what format the binary data is in, but could it be compressed more?
I must apologize to you all. I found your SETI project very interesting and decided to post a link at my school.
Bad idea, millions of us tried access to your project and we slashdotted it. Sorry.
Sincerely,
Bor'nok-Tfan III
2nd grade, Physics at Lem-Blupto University
Planet Tirblon
PS:
Cold fusion works, just ask if you want details.
Oh, and BTW, don't try that BH thing. It also works, but unstably and will swallow everything.
I also hacked a simple brain interface to the kernel (2.5 only and requires IQ 350 - should work ok for dolphins). E-mail me for the patch - (nokborNO@SPAMlem.edu.pp.tr) - remove the NO SPAM part.
Time for SETI@Home to take a page out of the Dnet book. Let the client cache multiple blocks. Have the client contact the server before it runs out of data and schedule a time to retrieve more blocks.
Simple.
Seti@home isn't looking for aliens that are flying around in spaceships at warp speed, it's looking for planetbound aliens who are at roughly our technology level.
Compression works by finding repeated patterns and then doing something about them.
If the SETI people have a lot of work units -- or even any work units -- that have lots of repeated patterns in them, then those are very interesting work units!
this may sound funny if you can't raise money at $300 dollars per megabit but ever think of using a provider like cogent you could be provisioned a 100Mbps cat5 link for $3000 per month and use all you want. Just a thought
UCB net admins and other interested parties have been discussing how to deal with the increased bandwidth demand on the ucb.net.discussion newsgroup: Google Groups thread: "latency from off-campus".
I live across the street from the Berkeley CS building where half the EECS servers are housed, and my connection to those machines can get pretty lagged. Having an inconsistent ISP certainly exacerbates the situation, but my experience with off-campus latencies has been quite bad for the past two years.
Sure it's sad that Seti@home users can't use their computer's idle cycles quite so effortlessly anymore, but the bigger picture is that everyone trying to connect off-campus is suffering, especially people who are trying to get work done.
The surprising thing for me is that detaching the dorm network (with all the student-run servers) leaves very few computers that could be sucking up all the bandwidth. We've suffered through DoS attacks from time to time, but the fact that Kazaa is still the number one bandwidth hog makes me wonder who runs these apps (professors? grad students? janitors?) and where are they running them from (lab computers aren't the best places to store all that warez, mp3s, and divx files, unless you don't care that they all get erased every day).
The residence halls have a separate 40Mbps pipe, so it is 110Mbps combined. Also UC Berkeley conntects to Calren-2 and Internet-2 which run at much higher speeds but the problem with those is that they connect to large universities only.
Not to be too cynical about this, but I wonder how much processing time you end up giving to the companies who refuse to lower their drug prices for third world countries because they think that profit is more important than the lives of people suffering the AIDS pandemic (as well as ripping off Americans and bribing doctors and pharmacists).
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
One place they don't have to look is Taco's house.
Ok, so when I get Quake III Arena for Linux, it'll run on your 68K Mac? Oh, what's that? Software targets specific hardware too, and it isn't enough to identify software's target by its intended operating system?
I think what you really meant to say in your rant, is that software targets a platform, and a platform consists not only of the hardware (Gateway G6-300 PC, Apple G4 PowerMac, SunBlade 1000, SunBeam Toaster), but also the OS running on it (Windows / Linux, Mac OS / Linux, Solaris / Linux, George's Custom 30-word RTOS).
You're dealing with slang here. When people say PC without any further qualifiers, they mean "the typical realization of the PC hardware platform running the current mainstream operating system for that hardware." (Which, right now, typically translates to a Wintel box.) We all use shorthand for common phrases. Get over it. At least we're not asking "Does this computer have the Internet on it?"
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
Moderation Totals: Offtopic=1, Total=1.
Boy, that was quick!
Just think of all the processors that are overheating because of blasted things like this. It makes baby jesus cry.
CalREN-2 consists of two giant loops - called CalREN North serving UC berkley and CalREN South (in the Los Angeles area). Each loop is a gigaPOP - providing the high-speed connection into the nationwide Internet. Each loop provides OC-48 (2,448 Mbp/s) connections to member campuses.
Now, since this equipment has been in place since the middle of last summer, Why are they using their dual 45Mb/s connection? Just get some cable dogs out there to run some fiber. Hell, I'll get out there and run some fiber for them. Remember when some yahoo's cut their fiber while stealing copper to recycle? They were down for like two weeks. Well, it took them two weeks to run fiber across the campus again. If they get started now, they could have as much bandwidth as they could possible want by running fiber to their Internet 2 pop.
I have seen the I2 Pop at the Sonoma county office of education. It is running at OC-3 (155Mb/s). That means a bunch of elementary schools have twice the bandwidth as the most prestigious Computer Science program currently running in the world. Prestigious? Yes, they have effectively harnessed millions of desktops to create the fastest computer on the planet by a huge margin. They push 27 Tflop/s on 25 Mb/s compared to ASCI White that just passed 10 Tflop/s. My computers, like every body else's, have wasted a lot of cycles waiting for data. Imagine if they had 2,448 Mbp/s available to them and enough users to create the first 2+ giga-flops computer. Of course they would need 240 million users to achieve that.
Just to be a pessimist, that is probably exactly what all the distributed modules in Win2K/XP are for. Bill is going to have a really nice computer one of these days.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Last month there was a presentation by the Berkeley campus net. admin regarding the issues that are being discuessed here. It shows the traffic flows, how they increased when the students came, how problems occured when controlling traffic, and more!
In fact, you can look here to get the story on what various universities are doing to manage traffic.
One possible solution is to run SETI proxies at other universities that will route the traffic to Berkeley via Internet2, since that traffic is free and isn't being regulated/restricted. However, this may not work given that the problem is with transmitting the large data sets to clients, rather than receiving their relatively small responses.
that's pretty good. how long did it take you to come up with that?
did you come up with it while you were waiting for your seti@home client to finish its processing so that it could flush and you could see if SetiQueue really works? that would kinda make it not offtopic.
now if you would've done commander tom, and wrote it about both a troll/first poster and seti@home, then i'd give you mad props.
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
Hope they don't use @home for their internet access ...
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
There are Linux versions available also.
mod this up
--
invalidp0jgaWFggr !
This wasn't very hard to see coming, but its still unfortunate.
For those who are looking for a workunit-caching program for linux, I've written a perlscript which has done a quite good job at it. I've decided to release it tonight, to help everyone out, but its a bit rough on the edges. It does the job, though. Read the README, download it here. Also, mirrors are welcome - my connection sucks far worse than theirs does =)
Paranoid
Bwaahahahahaa.
A great site that lists nearly all distributed projects + news about them: http://www.aspenleaf.com/distributed/
I know that at least 4 universities have a 10Gbit upling connecting eachother. Most others have 1Gbit. The Surfnet-network which interconnects all dutch universities is connected to several other research networks (one of them is the US Internet2) with at least gigabit speed. Read more about this at this website. Since the network is there, and it is clearly meant to be used for research purposes I hope some Dutch university (or the Surfnet organisation itself) will raise its hand and help out.
The reason Seti's packet sizes are so big is that they are sending real data.
:-)
When the likes of dnet send out data to process its just a matter of start point and size, as for the cancer busters the data requirements for encoding of a few molecules is quite small. Seti on the other hand have to supply you with something like 11 seconds of recording to process.
The reason for this is that any "real" signal comming from a fixed point in space will "pass by" the Arecibo observatory over a period of 7 seconds starting off weak, peeking and then dropping off. Its those kind of 7 second cycles they are looking for and you need to have a big enough window to detect them. More details are in the technical section on seti's site, but if you could hold of on trying to read it for a couple of days as I have some blocks that I'm trying to upload
-- Vagnerr - (www.vagnerr.com) Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
I've also created an actual webpage for it.
You can find it here.
Paranoid
Bwaahahahahaa.
When I can't connect to SETI at 4 AM California time because UC@Berkeley's LAN is maxed out, there is nothing that SETI to their software to fix the situation. Why hasn't UC@Berkeley used a sniffer to find where the bottleneck is ? It's really pathetic how this problem has been handled.
Has anyone checked the Seti code for keylogging or other type of spyware? Is it possible to check what is received/sent to Seti? Beyond my capabilities.
http://somethingawful.com/
Seeing as how I was sending in 11 results per day until this recent fiasco, I know that the project uses two matching return codes for the same Work Unit to close that Unit for analysis. The server is then flagged to stop sending it out. If a third or fourth good result from different users is returned for that Work Unit the user's account is credited, but nothing else was gained for the science.
Phoney Work Units returned to inflate statistics for a person or group are conspicuous because they are nonconforming. Return a few of these for the same ID and you start to show a pattern. The project's problem was the scale of the analysis. Try cross referencing billions of work units with millions of user IDs to look for nonconforming results. Said users (about 6) were found, locked out and the problem mostly stopped.
The SETI project at Berkeley is run by 6 people working part time. They have had remarkable results for their efforts.
jeesh ! dont you have anything better to do than spread your paranoia over /. ? give us a break ...
Loved the conspiracy theory idea! ;)
/.'d them to boot.
I just can't believe that the posters and readers ovelooked one thing, with an already saturated line, we've now
Wouldn't it make MORE sense to try and find out what's causing the sudden and obviously unexpected BW usage?
I mean, surely they have ruled out file-sharing services etc. They wouldn't overlook something so simple. (slight sarcasm intended.) Data isn't something that leaks out of Ethernet wire, it has to go SOMEWHERE. At worst, it's a bug that needs fixing.
The bandwidth problems are with the Seti@home packets, not the webserver. If you had read the article that you cut&pasted, you'd actually know that.
OK, who modded this up as FUNNY? Some moderator is trying to make a monkey out of me...
1. seti@home accept donations, as their site clearly indicates. Without wanting to sound pernickety, I would personally feel a lot better knowing that donations pointed at the project are actually going there, not just expended on UCB in general. As I understand it, there are several private financial donors. And when I say donor, I mean the greenback kind, not the cycle kind.
2. But starting last month (January 2002) the bandwidth used by the rest of campus increased in an unexpected and unexplained way Hmm. With that much bandwidth, how can such a surge still be unexplained? Basic sysadminship.
3. Someone said that one easy solution was to join other distributed computing projects. Someone else then slagged him/her off. Don't be silly. This is a real solution until the UCB sysadmins get their act together. Kazaa and morpheus shouldn't be using up bandwidth paid for with donations to setiathome.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
I'm sure there are a lot of corporate sponsors with massive bandwidth who would love to endorse this project. Why would they target the general public for scant donations here-and-there when they can instead focus on just signing one deal with a big media conglomerate?
Sure, they lose their soul, but this is supposed to be in the name of science, right?
Doesn't anyone find it a little ridiculous that with 3 million benefactors willing to give up their spare cycles that UC Berkeley can't scratch up the spare cash to provide adequate bandwidth?
I mean: $300/mo/Mb(which is no deal) * 25Mb Seti@Home usage = $7500/mo or $90,000/yr to completely fund this project's bandwidth?
Give me a break!
How much money is allocated for other projects that don't have a fraction of the public exposure for Berkeley that this one does?
I agree that most of the tangible results from this kind of research, and practically all basic science research in general, are the by-products of the process. Whenever you have a group of creative people trying to push on the frontiers of knowledge, trying to solve new kinds of problems, you get innovation. (Ouch, it's too bad Bill has brutalized that nice word in recent years!)
It happened with the Apollo missions jump-starting the integrated circuit, it happened with experimental particle physics when the unwieldy international collaborations came up with the web, and it happened in countless other instances.
But besides this, you should see the SETI search as a positive one regardless of the outcome. If they find something, well that's very interesting and opens up all kinds of possibilities. That's obviously worthwhile. But if they don't find anything, that's also valuable information since it helps to sets limits on some of the more slippery factors in Drake's equation. The search is probing a vast area of the sky and a generous frequency band on a scale that has never even been approached before. I think that the project is worthwhile on this basis alone.
Sorry to get political, but I feel it's important to plug basic science research like this as often as possible, since our society at large simply doesn't care or know about what's happening. The current US government is cutting down on basic research funding in an unprecidented way that will cripple progress for decades to come. I think other countries are beginning to follow the US's example and are doing the same. Recent graduates are finding better, more stable jobs in industry and the experience in these fields of science is being evaporated away. This impacts the education programs too, since fewer professors can be supported at universities, and thus the undergraduate science education suffers. This weakens the education of the ed majors too, many of whom will teach science at the high school level and earlier. This is already considered to be the primary weakness of the US education system, stemming from the fact that most students completing a 100-level physics course still lack even the most basic qualitative understanding of the material. Our society is built on technology, which is built on science. If you take away the foundation of a building, you can't expect it to remain standing.
I don't have much in the way of concrete, current numbers right now but obviously NASA is being cut to the bone, and particle physics is also suffering huge cutbacks. Virtually all new initiatives are being canned. I believe the situation is the same in most of the fields of basic science. This is because the public at large isn't putting any pressure on the government to continue supporting science funding. Research funding was not even an issue in the last Presidential election. I found only one statement in all of Bush's campaign materials that even mentioned basic science, which was a single sentence to the effect that it should all be privately funded. This statement is patently outrageous, but no one asked about it, knew about it, or even cared.
Okay, now my axe is a little bit lighter.
I work in a lab on campus (not on the residental dorm pipe) kingkong.me.berkeley.edu and the bandwidth deosn't really seem to be affecting the speed of the network at all. Heck I just downloaded an iso from linuxiso.org at 200 Kbps just last week.
MMORPG fan-boy? Prove your worth
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