SETI@Home Close to Half-Billionth Result

Jonathan writes: "SETI@Home, the largest distributed computing project in the world, is on the verge of receiving its 500 millionth result. This is a major milestone for both the project and distributed computing as a whole. Oh, and if you still need some added incentive to get involved, there's a $500 reward for the user who returns the milestone result."

Comments

Is it worth it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has SETI posted any *real* results yet, or is it just a waste of time and CPU cycles?

Perfect Timing....

[Mrdzone]

Now that E.T. has returned to the theatres maybe seti will finally get some respect.

Great program

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always thought SETI was a great program, my firm provides a lot of data to the seti institute, when we aren't using the radio telescopes in our building (about once every few weeks).

The real question is, what have they learned from their project, not only as far as life in outer space is concerned, but also in the terms of such a large distributed computing project? It seems like this would be a great thing for NPO's to get involved in, to solve other problems such as global warming, and the problem which I think we will all agree is the most important, how to pour hot grits down Natalie Portman's naked petrified pants?

Quite a bargain...

[KFury]

Not that I'm critical, but just because it's amusing: $500 is the prize for the half-billionth unit. That equates to 0.0001 cents per 17-hour CPU unit.

Looked at another way, the total number of FP operations to reach the 0.5 gigaunit mark is 1.5319e21. The brand new NEC Earth Simulator runs at 35,600 gigaflops. At that rate, the world's fastest supercomputer would take 43030061.73 seconds, or 498 days, to do the job.

I wish I could lease the world's fastest computer for $1 a day...

Anyone using this instead of folding, sucks

[Wizy]

Folding@home is actually trying to help cure diseases. Seti@home is chasing noises in space. I would much rather cure the diseases personally.

My spare cycles go to the GIMPS

[circletimessquare]

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. A Mersenne Prime is of the form 2^x-1. Five have been found so far through GIMPS.

If it's money you want, it's $100,000 to the GIMPS for the first person who can catch a ten million digit prime number, and then split up according to the rules on this page.

If it's nobility you want, the money is awarded by the EFF to spur on cooperative computing.

BTW, it was a Slashdot story that clued me in in the first place.

Re:My spare cycles go to the GIMPS

[circletimessquare]

After the split, what are you going to do with your 42 cents?

uh... read the page before you post, you know? kinda like thinking before talking? ;-P

by my quick reading of the page, it looks like $35,000 if you get the 10 million digit prime, or $5,000 if you get any other kind of mersenne prime in the meantime.

i think it's less than $35 grand, specifically, $25 grand, if someone claims the $10 grand for discovering a new search algorithm... no skill or spare cycles involved in winning that at all, but a lot of cranium capacity! ;-P

and the odds are not bad, at least on the scale of the lotto... like something around 1 in 250,000... albeit, each chance is going to cost your average 1 GHz pentium around 6 months of steady work...

i think i'm beginning to sound like a salesman for this search, so just so you know, i have no affiliation to the GIMPS site at all, i'm just an eager individual... in fact, it would behoove me not to plug it so there is more chances for those already involved! ...but that's not the point of these kind of projects ;-)

download the app folks... it's a kewl deal, you might make mathematics history!

Wardriving aliens looking for open ports...

[lildogie]

I find it odd that after being hit with waves of terrestrial trojans like Code Red and Melissa, we still think it's kewl to connect the planetary computer network to the sky via a radio-telescope.

What we're hoping for is to find the big IRC in the sky. Careful what you wish for--those aliens might me more than just chatty. If they're ever-so-much more intelligent than us, think of the viruses some of them must be writing....

Re:Everything is Sweetened by Risk

[div_2n]

Actually I think there is quite a bit at risk. The discovery of intelligent life possibly more intelligent than us could cause some severe religious, social and governmental problems.

For religious types it might mean they have to redefine and reinterpret their texts. It could even be worse for religions if the message we receive says something like "Nice to see you are coming along. We wondered how long it would take our genetic experiment to mature this far along."

Socially it could easily become an "us vs. them" mentality where we stand more unified. This would be a good thing. Perhaps many disputes would resolve very quickly. Perhaps not.

For governments it could be troubling because now we are faced with a potential new threat. Especially if they are far more technically advanced. Do we make contact? What if they want to colonize because their planet just got creamed by a supernova? More to the point, what if they check out our DNA and find us to be an alarming mixture of intelligence and animalism to the point of us being the killer bees of the galaxy? I know this isn't necessarily likely but imagine their disposition. Here is an intelligent species that uses technology at every turn as a weapon.

Anyway, enough rambling. I hope my point is clear.

I'd like to help out more...

[Wiwi Jumbo]

I had Seti running constantly for over 2 years... but there are a lot of other projects I'd like to help out on as well.

But neither one plays nice with the others.

While I wish there was some "master program" which these distributive projects could plug into fact is on a Wintel machine you can seemingly only run one to any benefit....

And if I gotta choose, I'll take fighting cancer..