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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?
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jonathan barket
If Seti@home goes bankrupt, will the creditors come and repossess my extra cpu cycles?
Maybe they should start looking for RICH aliens?
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
THey should ask SR Hadden for money.
There\'s no place like ~
I've been crunching numbers for SETI for a while now. It's sad that they're running out of money, but it's a part of how their program works. All that bandwidth, and nobody paying for it. They don't get any ad money, and bandwidth is very hard to come by these days. Heck, every one person has to download a few hundred KiB of data every few hours.
That may not sound like much... but when you have 4,027,337 users, it's a lot. Even assuming that only 1/4 of those users actively contribute, you're still looking at a million people downloading > 2 megs a day. Also, some of those million people run whole server farms, and that can build the cost up to 100 megs a day.
Bandwidth isn't cheap. If they run out of funding, I'll be sad to see them go.
1) Gain access to volunteering bank accounts.
2) When the account is idle for a bit, slowly draw a few cents every so often.
3) ???
4) Profit! Errr, stay in 'business.'
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
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.
We *need* to finish it so Parkes can double their city's science output!
In news today, it was reported that, in an attempt to deal with a funding shortfall, SETI has spawned a daughter organization SETF (Search for Extra Terrestrial Funding). One of the biggest obstacles that SETI officials face is determining the appropriate exchange rate from the intergalactic rugblat to the dollar.
First Falcon-1 to orbit, then Falcon-9. Then I can die a happy man.
Worth it? Oh yes, most definitely.
I consider SETI@Home to be one of the most inspirational projects ever attempted by our generation. Really, it's my equivalent of the moon shot (which happened two years before I was born).
I don't get misty-eyed very easily, but when I think about the films of JFK's inspirational speech... well, I hope the Kleenex is handy.
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
Who cares if this ever produces real results or not? It doesn't matter. It's the search that is important. Human beings striving for something new, working hard to discover whether they are truly not alone in the universe. I consider that to be an outstanding effort and achievement, even if we never find ET. I am proud to donate my computer's spare CPU cycles to such a noble effort.
God, that sounds so cheesy to go back and read it. But there it is. There's not much in the world today I get to feel good about. SETI@Home is definitely one of them.
Perhaps they can set up a Donate icon on their application, perhaps through Paypal...
I'm sure there would be tons of people willing to donate.
I don't agree with this. Sure we may never come in contact with any alien life, but think about the side benefits. Without the great impact of seti@home, we probably would have never had companies like United Devices which have done research into ways of curing cancer using distributed computing. Seti@home has shown to the masses a new way of doing great things. If nothing else, the publicity that seti@home got has sparked a completely new area of computing that was only previously available to "techies".
- funding from big contributors (without commercial obligations), not likely to continue (forever)
- funding from users. If 500 000 paypalled $5, it could be enough. Would you?
- advertising, 4 million users. Could work, would you accept it.
- become a subproject of another (commercial project), search ETs only with certain percentage of available CPU power.
- be eaten by an OS vendor (at some stage, a distributed client will become a fixed part of many operating systems, I believe) this might provide a kickstart for doing it for some vendor.
- run it by volunteers, reduce staff costs.
Can you come up with something else?
This is another Entropia project, they test millions of candidate drug compounds against detailed models of evolving AIDS viruses.
What fun is being "cool" if you can't wear a sombrero? (Hobbes of Calvin & Hobbes)
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)
They should just release a "special" version for bank employees.
I know more than you drink.
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.
Too bad they wont promise that the cure will be in the public domain. I won't contribute to that if they are going to hold my friends and family hostage if they find something with my cycles...
I lost my wife to cancer, but that's no excuse for this kind of idiocy.
a) Some cancer is avoidable (e.g. smoking) and some AIDS is not (transfusion, maternal transmission to infants).
b) Expecting people to avoid a disease by resisting the single most powerful biological instinct is stupid. It isn't going to happen. A medical treatment is the only hope.
c) HIV is a wake-up call. It is purely our good fortune that it is so hard to get that you have to have sex or a transfusion to get it, rather than being spread by mosquitoes like West Nile, or through the air like measles. The next virus to come down the pike may not be so well-behaved as HIV. Most of what we learn fighting HIV is likely to help us against the next one.
d) It's not a zero-sum game. Advances in biology are often portable. A cure for cancer could quite plausibly come out of AIDS research.
e) AIDS is increasing; most cancers are not. We don't have to worry about an epidemic of cancer among young people. Yet just such an AIDS epidemic is wiping out people wholesale in Africa. There is so much sickness that it is contributing to starvation, because people are too ill to raise food.
It's a totally trivial back-of-the-envelope calculation to deduce how many cycles it takes to find the key for an encrypted message by brute force (the way that distributed.net does it). Why do we need to corroborate that statistic via one very expensive sample?
The government does not need a lesson on the value of strong encryption: these figures are easy to work out, and in any case the NSA already has supercomputers that they use (presumably) to do the same thing. (Except, they likely have better technology than brute force for some ciphers...)
Distributed.net is not about "breaking" encryption. The ONLY thing we learn from it is the encryption key. The key was generated by the contest organizers, and if they wanted, they could have just saved it and we'd be one bajillion cycles richer.
I think it's much more interesting to put my cycles towards something where the answer isn't known! The various folding@home, aids@home, etc. efforts are tantalizing, though it's not clear that they will ever have actual results. Personally, I'm using GIMPS (primenet), which searches for very large prime numbers. (If you want to float your encryption boat, you could recall that asymmetric encryption often uses large prime numbers, though these primes would be totally useless for that.) This is the distributed computing program I know of that has had the most tangible results: three of the world's largest known primes were found by it. (It's also one of the oldest... I joined about 7 years ago.)
GIMPS is here: http://entropia.com/ips/
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