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."

Comments

Scaleability

[WndrBr3d]

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.

Necessity is the mother of invention

[m_evanchik]

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!