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SETI@Home Faces Funding Problems
blamanj writes "The aussie version of ZDNET is reporting that money to continue the SETI@Home project is in jeopardy, and it may fall by the wayside unless further funding can be found."
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Protein folding distributed analysis by IBM...folded. I heard something about cycles for cancer, but I can't find a link.
RIGHT NOW, what can I use my spare cycles for, besides SETI?
Primenet/GIMPS.
http://www.entropia.com/ips/
They search for very large mersenne primes.
Unlike distributed.net, they're computing something new (distributed.net searches for decryption keys to a message whose contents is known!), and unlike SETI@home, they've had actual results: three of the largest prime numbers known to man were found through Primenet.
Just to name a few:
Folding@Home (don't know the exact link)
UnitedDevices (www.uniteddevices.com)
You can contribute to a cure for cancer with a project managed by Oxford University's Dr. Graham Richards. This is currently in a second phase using LigandFit virtual screening software.Powered by Accelrys (scientific software) and United Devices (Global Metaprocessor). Link is here
Not sure if anyone else has mentioned this, but United Devices has a distributed computing project up that helps find a cure for cancer. Phase II, which began late last summer, is called LIGANDFIT, and 'helps scientists to characterize therapeutic targets and identify and assess drug canididates by performing automated docking of flexible ligands to a protien's binding site.' I'd encourage anyone who has a box with cycles to spare to check it out- i'm pretty sure they've got a linux client, as well as a windows one. I've been running it for 80+ days now, and i haven't noticed any problems with performance- and it's the least we can do for the public good.
filter: +3. Hey, look! all the trolls went away!
Of course I was denied 2 hours ago.. how long could that story have existed? Maybe I took too long by ACTUALLY READING IT :P
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Um, dude - the government doesn't fund SETI. I think that's why they are running out of money.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
They already have a system for accepting donations.
Go here to donate by credit card or mail.
They also provide a chart of their donations over the last year here.
BWCarver -- 1301 work units and counting...
Like Digital Freedoms? Then donate to EFF before they're gone.
And I'd say that it's probably not even the biggest cost. Bandwidth really isn't that expensive any more. It's probably 1/10 of what it cost when they started... maybe closer to 1/100. I would imagine the biggest cost has got to be the use of that giant friggin radio telescope. Considering it's the biggest in the world (lucky me... I got to see it in person, and even go into one of the control rooms), it can't be cheap to operate.
Actually, it GIVES 3 Culture!
Perhaps we need to overthrow the current government, it's spending too much fighting silly wars instead of building some decent Wonders.
If they were to use something like a securely sandboxed virtual machine (and there are several groups I know about doing this with funding in Europe) then it may be an idea.
Of course at that point both the user and seti start having to worry far more about security than someone just changing their processing times or returning incorrectly processed units due to mods to the software which used to happen.
Of course if people want to contribute then they can go to The SETI Donor page and contribute there.
well, this is an academic program supported by the various sources that academic types get funding from (state agencies, the university, private sponsors, etc.) I dont think they ever had any intention of making it able to support itself. SETI has been running a long time, and most likely the core project will still run even if the @home portion has to go. Even though the bandwidth costs are high for the project, if the project ever had to purchase THAT kind of processing power for itself, I am sure the cost would far exceed by many orders of magnitude the price for processing time now. If the funders look at a cost/benefit analysis of the project they will find the money. SETI was meant to be a very long term project. It must be nice to not be expected to produce any results at any given time :). I mean correct me if I am wrong, but 1 million people (which I think is about right) * 2 megabyte (which I think is alot) = 1,000GB right? An OC-3 + whatever connection should just about cover that, so youre looking at bandwidth costs of around $100k/month, or about 1.2 million per year. Now I bet you there is absolutely no way that they could come even remotely close to getting that kind of processing power for that little amount of money. For a popular (with the people) project like this, I would think getting another million to run for a year would be a piece of cake. And is this news? Projects like this are always in need of funding. At my old university every year the chairman came by and said, geez, the funding is really tight this year, I dont know... we might have to cut you 10% or so... at which point the scientists beg and plead and say theyll do this this and that and whatnot and negotiate to get their funding. Its a game. I doubt seti@home is going anywhere.
If we feel this is a good cause towards humanity's future, let's not sit on our hands, and consider donating to this worthy cause!
Here's the URL... I hope many of your readers use it:
PS: I do not work for SETI@Home. I just think the Internet could work in it's favour if we all shelled out $5+ a piece
Basically, we're always in a funding crisis. I personally spend a huge chunk of my time here at the SETI lab writing grant proposals. That's what academia is all about. I've been working in this group for 6 years now, and we've always been just scraping by. This is NOT NEWS.
In fact, we're pushing forward on all fronts. Please see:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/setifuture.html
- Matt Lebofsky - SETI@home
Sure, finding a signal from ET is a longshot. But the project is also useful for real science in astrophysics.
The large computational power available is unique and makes it extremely useful for finding many kinds of time-variable radio sources (not just ET). The project is also being used to map the Hydrogen in the galaxy as detailed here.
Even though getting signals from an extraterrestrial intelligence may be a pipe dream, the project still has value from a pure scientific standpoint.
The University of Kansas' 'Lifemapper' project ...maps where Earth's species of plants and animals live, and could potentially live.
http://beta.lifemapper.org
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
According to this graph the total amounts of donations have just fallen from a few thousand to a few hundred dollars (yes, thank you, I located it from this informative post).
/. might solve the problem. But then again, maybe there are more material issues, maybe they missed a grant or something...?
Is this the extent of the problem? If so, it seems like just bringing it up once at
Tor
RC5-64 was supposed to take something like a hundred years when we started that, and it managed to be completed in about 5
The amount of processing power used for Distributed.net's RC5-64 effort hadn't grown exponentially but rather pretty much linearly. There's a limit to the power of even word of mouth.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is true for Fight AIDS @ home, but not (as far as I know) for GIMPS. I've been running GIMPS for about 7 years now and have never seen it do any non-mersenne work. I also don't see anything about that on the GIMPS home page.
The situation isn't as dire as it sounds. Our dominant problem has been that the falling economy has caused some of our sponsors to withdraw support. With support withdrawn, we are denied matching funds from the University. Essentially, the University is witholding funding until we find further sponsors. We are actively seeking corporate sponsors who would be willing to donate, and have their contributions matched by the University. Under the matching program the sponsors must be for-profit industry. If anyone reading this works for such a corporation, please contact SETI@home through our web site.
Individuals wishing to make a contribution can do so through the SETI@home web site. Please be aware that our current largest sponsor is the Planetary Society. A membership to the Planetary Society (assuming it is done through the links on the SETI@home page) may return more to SETI@home than does a direct contribution, as it indicates the importance of SETI@home to members of the Society.
Regardless of the funding issues, we are working hard to make SETI@home II a reality. We have funding from the NSF to develop the BOINC client/server code which will be used as the framework for SETI@home II. We are in the process of building the SETI@home II data recorder. What we do with it (multibeam, wide bandwidth) and where (Arecibo or Parkes) depends upon what we can afford.
We are also seeking NSF funding for AstroPulse and SETHI and SERENDIP V.
That said, things are currently somewhat tight here. We'll need to make do with fewer employees until we're back in the black. I don't think this spells the end of SETI@home by any means.
Support SETI@home
But opensourcing brings another problem - anybody could just take the source and change it so that it polutes the main system with fake results.
We're in the process of attempting a new solution to this problem. We're open sourcing the distributed computing framework (essentially the operating system) and allowing the computing application to be closed source. This method opens the code signing/verification and data encryption code to be viewed by anyone who is interested, but doesn't necessarily allow untrusted application code to return a result. (Look here for more info).
Support SETI@home
Not true for GIMPS, which is a project completely separate from Entropia's commercial projects. GIMPS was Entropia's proof of concept before launching their business, and today it is being kept running out of gratitude to George Woltman who provided that test project.
The GIMPS client is provided by Woltman and not by Entropia, and it is incapable of doing anything other than factoring and primality testing mersenne numbers.