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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."
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.
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I didn't want to leave this space blank.
"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.
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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.
> because the demand will grow exponentially the more users you aquire
Call me crazy, but I'd guess that demand on seti's servers grows linearly with the number of users. Unless each new user gets sent all of the data ever sent to all the previous users, of course.
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.
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I don't mean to be rude but another solution, if you're running windows, is to try to find a cure for cancer, or alzheimers, or anthrax, instead of looking for extra-terrestrial life.
Yeah. Why bother looking for such trivial things as life in the universe besides us? Why should we have gone into the rain forest just for the sake of going? Let's forget about we found a new type of antibiotic in the process.
Why should we do things with no clear prospect of return? Well, one could argue we do them for science. You know? That old thing that leads to new advances in humanity? One could argue that great discoveries are often by accident. That means by looking and doing something new -- not always directed toward solving the problem at hand -- leads to a solution of a major problem.
What does all of this have to do with searching for aliens? Well, it means we shouldn't stop doing something that some here might think as trivial or un-worldly, just because there are other issues at home. There will always be issues at home. Curing cancer, in many ways, is just as big a task as SETI@Home. It's the same as those who questioned the spending of millions of dollars for the space program, and that sending a man to the moon was stupid since we couldn't even solve our own problem of where to put and feed our own people.
Well, what has gone to the moon given us? Certainly not a cure for cancer, at least not directly. What is has done is captured the imaginations of all those who were glued to the TV when those infamous images were sent back...Maybe a few of those millions have actually gone on to become doctors, engineers, etc. who have cured a disease or solved a new problem for humanity. It represented something new, raised hopes for people during that time and allowed many to live vicariously and not be concerned with current "at home" issues like finding a job or worrying about the war.
There is a lot of merit for science dedicated toward application and I don't have any problem with, say, searching the a cure for cancer or Alzheimers. But the argument of there are better things to do is like the argument of "People are wasting bandwidth for trivial uses, that's why the Internet is so slow.".
We should all dedicate our efforts toward solving our present problems, but we should always save a little to go to the moon once in a while...
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
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.
SETI should wait until we have our own world's problems figured out.
Humans are made of meat, and sure, cancer is a problem we'd like to solve. But humans are also uniquely explorers and thinkers, and Not Knowing(tm) IS genuinely one of our problems. Some believe that SETI is a step towards solving that problem. File it under "motivation" or "purpose" (by simplying "knowing").
A future generation may answer the eternal question for us. And if they do, every generation that follows will be affected in their daily outlook, their goals, their attitudes, their comforts, their concerns, etc. That's at least as profound as a cure for cancer.