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New Seti@Home Client to be Open to Other Projects
An anonymous reader writes "Seti@home is preparing to make a major change to their client and backend. The new system "boinc"
will be a general purpose client and accept work units from other projects (selected by the user).
This will open-up Seti@Home's millions strong user base to academic projects that cannot afford supercomputers. As boinc is an open source framework other distributed projects (think!, folding@home etc) will also be able to use it giving boinc a larger installed base than Seti@Home."
What kind of authentication process will be in place? Basically, what will stop someone from using this for illegal/dishonest purposes under the guise of academic research? Will this be exploitable for virus/spam propogation?
GL
maybe thye culd use disributed computingto fix all teh speling errors on salshfot!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It would be interesting to use this to try and find more digits in pi. Maybe we will finally find a repeat. Barring that we will have very accurate circles :) There are a great deal more mathmatical problems that would benefit greatly from this!
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
Not cooler, but better. More important ones, like folding, for instance. A very (VERY) small chance of finding intelligent life out there isn't quite worth it, I don't think.
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
Last time I had ran SETI@home on my AMD 233 MHz laptop, it overheated, crashed, detroyed the password file, corrupted the kernel, and erased a directory... I think RAM wrote itself to the HDD somehow when the CPU crashed... At anyrate, I had a reinstall to do after only 1 reply.
Karma: Good, or bust!
I'm not going to bother, because about 20 people are about to tell you why pi is has no end.
Banaaaana!
Can I run SETI@Home over a dialup connection?
Do aliens run SETI@home, also?
Can I run it on my palm pilot?
Yeah but what could be more important than processing endless amounts of data on seemingly empty space?
Imagine wasting time on something stupid like a cure for some disease, or ending global warming.
BOINK/BOINC has a totally different meaning in countries outside the US.
This client could have hundreds of millions of people boinking all over the world.
Imagine... the population explosion.
This could be the world's biggest cluster....
This is not the first time this mistake has been made.
I remember when FoxPro for windows was first released
with buttons that deppressed and bounced back up(Oh Wow).
Their (Fox Software (not yet M$)). Caught onto this
boinking the buttons theme. When they did their first
demo in Europe going on about 'Boinking in FoxPro'
The audience went slackjawed.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Unless you give it away for free.
Is the cost of power that you use while you are running these programs tax-deductible?
Doing something out of the goodness of your heart is awfully sweet. Getting the government to lower your taxes because of it is sweeter.
Can I use it to find intelligent life in my apartment complex? The neighbors are keeping me up all night with their parties...
I installed the advanced toolbar from google and turned on the client to do calculations in idle time. I observed system processes and saw that the client takes up to 97% of the CPU resources. Even mozilla becomes slow. Is anyone else facing similar issues?
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
yeh, I just had a read of the license-1.0.txt
2.1. The Initial Developer Grant.
Subject to the restrictions on commercial use set forth below, the Initial Developer hereby grants You a world-wide, Royalty-free, non-exclusive license, subject to third party intellectual property claims:
(a) to use, reproduce, modify, display, perform, sublicense and distribute the Original Code (or portions thereof) with or without Modifications, or as part of a Larger Work, provided, however, that You are not permitted under said license to create, sell, or distribute commercial products based on the Source Code;
So, without permission to sell it or to sell derived works, it's not Free Software, or OpenSource.
(this is important, because it means you can't integrate the code into existing commercial software, and it's incompatible with the GNU GPL, so you can't integrate this code into the majority of the software packages that come with a distro)
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
As you said, SETI is cool. Who wouldn't want to be the owner of the computer that discovers intelligent, extra-terrestrial life? However I think the coolness is what is needed to attract volunteers... while protein-folding is more relevant to immediate advances in science/ medicine, it lacks the mystique of SETI and the unknown factor which the general public can easily grasp. SETI is romantic, protein folding isn't - although I agree it is more important. Having said that, I'm more likely to donate my spare cycles and bandwidth to protein folding than SETI...
Putting syrup in coffee is some form of blasphemy.
Turn your damn computer off when you're not using it!!!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
is there poontang out there for the geek? somewhere in the universe? maybe not, mabye so, even if it aint the usual sweety yeasty breeze.
It has about as much chacne of that as teaching me how to spell
Stop signs are only Suggestions
Scientific progress goes "BOINC"?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
How many computers does it take before they finally "wake up"?
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!!
Oh, . . wait. . . . .
lol if you read this you have been owned by goatse.cx lol
<rant></rant>
#define DRM chmod 000
Man, I hate it when people steal my password to /. It's just embarassing.
I ran across an article regarding another project using the Seti@Home model. Fight AIDS at Home is using it to screen drug compounds.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
It's a new playground for all the evil in the computing world! Aieeee!
Do aliens run SETI@home, also?
Is that a trick question?
Trolling is a art,
Heres your integers that meet x^n + y^n = z^n, for n>2
x = -1 y = 1 z = 0 n = any odd integer > 2
-1^3 + 1^3 = 0^3
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
Will this new client allow for platform specific optimizations? For instance, the RC client took advantage of Altivec which allowed for Macs to absolutely dominate the small computer benchmarks in those ranking whereas they did not perform nearly as well in the SETI rankings. And just so the Wintel weenies don't feel left out and flame me, other platform specific optimizations could also be taken advantage of for Pentium specific calls or even SGI specific calls.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
"boinc is your best chance to boink an alien!"
pfft. boinkboink.
--
Power to the Peaceful
The new system "boinc" will be a general purpose client and accept work units from other projects (selected by the user).
Read the post.
will it be optimized for SIMD and the other new major processor enhancements like folding and distributed.net have done? A lot of people I know moved on to other projects where they felt their CPU time would be put to better use because of lack of support for this.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
ETI searches for you!
That is so blatant, you couldn't have truly meant it.
I wrote my Honors thesis on general-purpose distributed computing. I also implemented something I think more projects should use, which is presence awareness and work accounting. No more downloading of work units and sitting on them without ever uploading the results - with my system, you can immediately reassign a work unit when someone stops working on it. This eliminates double simultaneous assignment of individual work units. I used Jabber for my communications, and it would be pretty easy to implement hashing and cryptographic signing of work units and shared objects to ensure the integrity of your computation.
someone shutdown the skynet@HOME before it becomes self-aware...
Doesn't the japanese earth simulator do climate prediction? Are you redundant?
Or am I just missing the sarcasm?
Well with BOINC you can do both! BOINC can split projects. Run several at the same time.
Run SETI to get it all installed on those home boxes and then run folding or similar to get real work done.
Protien folding is how protiens are self assembled. When this assembly process goes wrong it leads to diseases like Alzheimer's. While your DNA does provide the blue print for proteins in your body the study of protein folding is not the modification of DNA.
Folding@Home seeks to understand the process of protein folding and look for a cure in places where proteins fold incorrectly.
Click Here For More Info
http://www.kubuntu.org/
Imagine a beowulf cluster of boincs. Sounds steamy.
I just hope the seti programmers don't fowl it up big time or it could turn out to be a real Cluster boinc. Ok I'll stop now.
Folding@Home is a great cause. We all know this. Finding a cure for a terrible disease is very noble.
But to really make it that much better you could sign up using my name and team number and help me crush the competition and fold the most protiens. Just install Folding@Home and use Screen Name: PRIME1 & Team#: 2630
If you are already using it from Google and just running the default setting make the change today. You will feel better knowing you helped out a good cause.
You can check my team stats here as you can see I need some help to get ahead. I thank you for your support.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
they're going to do what distributed.net has already done, provide a client that can work on multiple projects, chosen by the user. Oh well, in this game I suppose it's really the size of your user base that matters.
Tierce
Who sponsors your feelings?
I can't remember the last time I saw on Slashdot a link to Goatse.cx get modded so high. If there was anyone left who hadn't yet ventured into the bowels of -1 and saw this atrocity, they have now! :)
What, dishonest? You mean like running out of data to process, but lying to all your users and feeding them the same data over and over, while their systems burn energy by the megawatts, running useless calculations?
Please help metamoderate.
I don't think this post was made as a Troll. I do think the author meant for it to be satire on Seti@Home's new software.
There is no need to moderate it into the floor.
> What crawled up your ass? Everything points to "ad hominem" being correct.
I guess you don't know Latin, do you? "Ad hominem" is correct BUT DOESN'T MEAN THE SAME THING as "ad personam" you stupid asshole!
> Of course this has nothing to do with the original attack on the poster, because he was not combating an argument with a logical fallacy, but merely attacking the erstwhile poster.
*sigh* Are you really THAT stupid or was it just a lame joke?
Does the fact that they are finally open-sourcing the client mean that there will eventually be a Seti@Home xscreensaver module that actually works?
What will happen to my workunit totals?
BOINC keeps track of your computer's work in terms of actual computation, not workunits. This is necessary because BOINC projects may have workunits of many different "sizes". Because of this change, all SETI@home/BOINC accounts will start with zero credit.
So after 4 years of building my seti@home stats I will be starting from scratch! I guess now is the time to upgrade my equipment so I can get a jump on the competition :)
For example, while SETI is cool, I'm currently running ZetaGrid. For a while I was running folding, but they don't seem to be working on the screen saver as promised. Given my interests, I most want to donate my time to something related to evolution. I have tried Evolution@home, and while it does work in WINE, it's not automated enough for general use. So I'll be glad to have more choice, and to not have to configure a different client each time.
Litigious bastards
What I'd like to see is an open distributed-computing platform which lets me bank the hours my computer puts in and then use them later (minus overhead and commission) if ever I need to run, say, a couple of months worth of computing in a few minutes. Seems a no-brainer... Any volunteers?
Can I run multiple instances on a multiprocessor
Yes, but it's not necessary; BOINC automatically uses all the processors (unless you ask it not to).
I always wondered when seti@home would become multithreaded...
The reason, apparently, that parts are still non-free is that it might be cracked and someone would submit bugus results.
Really, guys. We all know that closed-source software can be messed with to give bad results, not to mention simply mocking the network transmission using another program and givinig back lots of bad data. What would be a secure way to ensure accurate results, by design, not obscurity?
I'm serious. Any ideas?
This is not a troll. SETI@Home is a very popular project, and the guys that run it do great alien hunting FFTs.
.NET/C#, Java, C++, and FORTRAN all have native bindings into the standards as well.
But didn't we all launch general purpose distributed computing frameworks about... 5-6 years ago? SETI's mastery of the press aside, I'm pretty sure we all stopped playing this game and started using the standards a year or so ago.
So that battle is long over. OGSA also known as "web services" or GRID or [10 other things] won in case you missed it. Every major company on Earth is using the standards already. Python, Perl,
BOINC is late to the party, in fact they completely missed it.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Parent should be moderated as offtopic twice and interesting as well as informative, thus staying at score:1. I guess moderatord dont know LAtin if they moderated it as troll.
Integrate SETI into KaZaA. People can get free music and find ET at the same time. Think of all those lost CPU cycles wasted on searching for Britney Spears. I just home the government doesn't go knocking on 12 year old's houses because their computer found the location of Elvis floating around in space.
!!!!! I know exactly what to use such an engine for: fighting spammers. Each computer that runs the screen saver downloads a list of spammers web sites -- the ones they list in their spam email. Then the computer proceeds to spider crawl that web site, throwing the results into the bit bucket. The result is a massive cooperative denial of service attack against spammers which is all perfectly legal !!!!!
Medical research receives millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions of dollars a year. Private charities donate, universities donate research in the form of science and laboratory labor, the government funds research and offers grants, and private individuals who've had a personal interaction with a particular disease strike up their drum bands to thump for whatever cause is now very near and dear to their heart due to the affliction of a loved one.
SETI has to fight and claw for resources. Space in general is very not in vogue in the US; other countries are leapfrogging ahead of us. The US' best chance for space these days is private ventures such as the XPrize teams. And of Space ventures, SETI is the recipient of endless eye rolling and 'funny' comments that liken it to a waste of time. None of the eye rolling bothered me all that much as long as SETI@Home was in operation, because I knew it was making a very real amount of progress in the search.
This change in SETI@Home upsets me very much. I was interested in donating to SETI@Home, that the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. Not the other searches, THIS search. The other searches have quite a bit of help and resources; SETI has very little. It very much confuses me why the SETI@Home team, which has done amazing and ground breaking work in not only the SETI field, but also in distributed computing, would choose to splinter and fritter away their computational resources like this. Opening the SETI network up to other projects does nothing but subtract resources from an already strapped scientific endeavor.
To put it bluntly, let the other projects go back to their wells to get resources; there is no well for SETI. And now what well we have is being pissed away.
This is not a good change. This is bad for SETI@Home, and is a serious setback for the project. Every computer that shifts from a SETI work unit to something else that's part of a well funded area of research is a waste.
Sorry, you're the loser, not me!
I'm in complete agreement with the parent post. Please mod up, up, up and away!
Just think, we'll be able to send literally millions of e-mails in a matter of seconds. We'll find buyers for all products, especially medical treatments for embarassing conditions and those that enhance one's masculine self-worth.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of, er a boinc cluster of hundreds of thousands of sendmail@Home processes, along with IRCBot@Home ones and port80spoofer@Home ones (strictly pointed at www.riaa.org, of course.) I just can't wait!
Nobody has yet tried to imagine a Beowulf cluster of these. What's up /.ers?
I used to run SETI@home because I thought it was more 'adventurous' than other distributed computing systems. But then, one day I thought, what are the chances that we will find extraterrestrial life vs. the chances that I will get cancer? I now run folding@home.
www.SeventeenOrBust.com
looking for numbers
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
A grid topology is created as running daemons either broadcast their presence on a particular subnet or by announcing themselves to already known nodes. Once a node is up and running it will receive requests for running computations from other nodes. If such a request is accepted (this must be done explicitly) a client program is downloaded from the serving node and then executed. On the other hand, if you want to run/serve a computation from your node, you launch a server session instead. This will start two things, in the following order: 1. A client provider server (multi-threaded) ready to provide client nodes with the computation client program and 2. The computation server program itself. The daemon provides both server and client programs which ports they should run on. For clients it's which server/port to connect to, and for servers it's which port to accept connections on.
Any given node can host/serve any number of computations. That is, it can run any number of clients as well as run any number of servers - each server having it's own multi-threaded client provider. Since both client and server programs are external binary programs, there are very few (if any) limitations on what can be run via gcdaemon. In most cases the server should be multi-threaded since it may receive connections from a possibly large number of nodes, but the client probably will be single-threaded and only perform some atomic computation. For now, it is assumed that the binary program is executable on the current node but it would be easy to add some sort of binary type detection and maybe run computations through a java/c# virtual machine. This has one obvious advantage: optimized clients.
All computations are identified by their client program's md5 checksum, guaranteeing no collisions and no running multiple instances of a computation on the same node.
Security
Running unknown, binary programs on your computeris of course a great security risc. This can be dealt with in a number of different ways. The two I have thought about is sandboxing and authentication. While the first would definately be a nice complement to the second, as well as a better solution for automated, small-scale computations, it is both harder to implement and might introduce unwanted constraints on computation programs. Authentication on the other hand, is very easy to implement but requires more user interaction for accepting computations or some ad hoc auto-accept hack. To use authentication one would simply add an authentication tag to the computation struct (which is sent with the employment request) which would hold a) the receiving node's hostname (or some other identifier) assymmetrical encrypted, and b) a (trusted) reference to the public part of the encryption key.
"Screenshot:" (not doing anything exciting though)
28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds... that is when the world will end.
Let's calculate e !
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
However, the promotion of SETI@Home by anyone demonstrates they have not looked at the problem in detail.
There is reasonably extensive documentation on the probable intelligence of advanced civilizations (for example see papers by Dr. Anders Sandberg (here) or myself (here). As I have pointed out at conferences and in papers the difference between an advanced civilization and the human civilization is ~10^24 Ops. The difference between a single human and and a nematode worm is ~10^15 Ops. We don't talk to worms and advanced civilizations don't talk to us!
Furthermore the entire SETI effort does not take into account the information content of an advanced civilization. By my estimates this is of the order of 10^50 bits (probably more). One cannot communicate even an extremely small fraction of that information content across interstellar space using radio waves. They simply lack the information carrying capacity. So the SETI Institute, Drake, Tarter, Shostak, et al have sold millions of computer users (as well as Paul Allen) a "bill of goods" without having done their fundamental homework on the limits of evolution of civilizations. Why on earth would one attempt to communicate with a civilization that is fundamentally less sophisticated than a nematode worm and with whom it is impossible to exchange a significant amount of information that one has at ones disposal?
In contrast Marvin Minsky (probably one of the leading AI experts in the world) and Freeman Dyson (a brilliant mathematician/physicist who should have won a Nobel Prize for his contribution to the Tomonaga/Schwinger/Feynman contribution to quantum electrodynamics were it not for the Prize limits of 3 individuals) had this worked out in 1971 at the conference between Russian and foreign scientists at the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory. Direct quote from the proceedings edited by Sagan:
MINSKY: Since radiation at any temperature above 3 deg. K is wasteful and a squandering of natural resources, the higher the civilization, the lower the infrared radiation. We should look for extended sources of 4 deg. K radiation. There should be very few natural such sources.
DYSON: I don't quite go along with this but to some extent you are right.
Minsky obtaining a concession from Dyson is significant. It has been ignored by the "radio waves from aliens" camp. They *will not* be trying to talk to us. But we *might* be able to observe them in the IR detection region. (Unfortunately IR detection is difficult to do from ground based telescopes.)
So the bottom line -- reallocate your spare computer resources to projects like folding or in the future to Nano@Home. SETI@Home is never going to succeed. It is based on outdated fantasies. Telescopes like the failed WIRE mission or the recently launched SIRTF *may* be able to detect alien civilizations but efforts such as SETI@Home are pointless until such time as the supporters make the case that advanced civilizations would want to waste their time communicating with sub-worm civilizations.
Robert
Q. What's better than free software?
A. Cheaper-than-free software that you actually get paid to use!
How about if someone with money to invest in a project, paid broadband users to run the project's own custom Linux distribution which would incorporate their project's client software? The client would run from a non-privileged account in user space, and the inherent features of Linux itself should provide sufficient protection for all but the most terminally stupid users. Obviously, payment to users would be contingent on return of results.
I think this would be permitted by the GPL, but I don't quite know who might want to use it {apart from spammers, but the Community would never prostitute themselves like that}.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
If it makes you feel any better, the results that protein-folding simulations provide aren't very useful for genetic engineering or commercial applications. They're simply interesting tests of theory, but they have nearly zero application to human medical sciences. Unfortunately the press coverage of computational protein structure simulation (thank you, Slashdot) tends to make overbroad generalizations about how we'll replace experimentalists with supercomputers and do all our biology in silico. In a word, horseshit.
There is definitely a place for this type of work, particularly when coupled with biophysical studies. But the idea that we'll be able to determine the structure of a protein from its sequence is laughable.
Sine this could be used to "create aliens" by simulating stuff. :-) Question is; will I be credited for crunching the unit that gave the answer to creating flying pigs, and do I want it? :-)
This message has been ROT-13 encrypted twice for higher security.
Why we haven't seen a windows worm type of virus that installs and runs some variation of one of the distributed computing projects? It wouldn't be all the hard to hack together a client that pulls work units from one of the projects, crunches the nubmers and returns the result.
Heck, better yet just incldue some subset of the range on untested primes/folds/seti units in the virus and only report back sucesses, that would take the load on the central servers. Think of the processing power that would be harnessed (in just a few hours!) if every explotable windows boxen hooked up to the net was cruning Prime nubmers or Folding rather than sending out spam messages?
Of course, non of this addresses the illegal and unethical nature of doing something along those lines.
Indeed. And there are dozens of distributed computing projects, so everyone can find one to his likings.
Click here for an overview of active distributed computing projects. Also have a look at the lists at the bottom of the page: these are projects you donate some of your own time to, instead of spare CPU cycles (from Distributed Proofreaders to The Hunger Site).
Further info on distributed computing: Bottomquark has reviewed a number of projects.
...perhaps because worms can't talk.
Atleast not on our level.
Trying to explain 10th grade algebra to a worm might be somewhat pointless. But.... we CAN indeed communicate with them at the level in which **they communicate amongst themselves.**
We can trick them into thinking it is time to reproduce (thru pheramones), lead them to food by leaving a chemical trail, ect. This is the level of communication that they are capable of. We understand it, we can replicate it (maybe not perfectly because we lack precise feedback). They respond to it.
To us, we are spraying a chemical on them to get them to screw (do worms screw?). To them, we are playing the equvalent if Luther Vandross over the stereo and pouring a glass of chianti.
My analogies are somewhat suspect, but you see my point I think.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
It may also be important to note that Robert was the person that authored the first nano@home proposal. So he has a vested interest in seeing users move from seti@home.
nano@home proposal
I am going to reach 5,000 units complete today, and I have to start over?
*sigh*
I do like the fact that you don't have to worry about which version you are running, as it will be updated server side.
I guess no one else read the book...
(The part about there being a message in pi wasn't in the film.)
I suppose it could be true that an extraterrestrial society MAY be so advanced today that they consider it wasteful to transmit RF and have since shifted to IR, or that there is no point in communicating with lesser beings TODAY.
But consider than any signals we receive will most likely be millions/thousands of years old already, originating from a state of the sending civilization that predates the present. At one time they may have attempted in vain to communicate with extraterrestrial civilizations themselves, or used just RF technology that leaked into space. Just like we do/are now. Any civilization, advanced or not, becamed "advanced" through stages and time. I think it is amazingly shortsighted for people to overlook that fact.
There is utility in listening, even when there is no sound or noise.
that is, it's the search for extra terrestrial intelligence, not the search for extra terrestrial hyper advanced intelligence.
I don't think we're only searching for godlike civilisations out there - we're searching for _anyone_, _anything_ - just so that we know that we're not all alone in the night.
It may not be perfect, but it's a start.
There are a number of problems here.
First, ultimately you're guessing. We just don't know because extra-terrestrial life hasn't wandered by to say hello. Comparing guesses against each other is a risky activity and not proof of any sort. It's a valid argument, but it isn't the ultimate truth.
Second, you assume that an advanced civilization would be willing to speak to such a lowly race as ourselves. Why not? If I thought nematode worms were sentient I'd strongly support studying and interacting with them. We do this already for life forms on our own planet (notably apes and dolphins). Heck, I'm sure that somewhere on this planet someone is studying how (if at all) nematode worms communicate. If this advanced civilization evolved as we did, they might be interested in studying a more primative version of themselves. The advanced civilization might just get in touch to be nice. "Gosh, it really sucked when we were so primative and thought we were alone in the universe, let's say hi to the silly monkey men, it's cheer them up."
Finally, who says we're looking for an advanced civilization? Maybe we'll find a civilization at roughly the same technological level as we are now (or at least was at that level when the signals were generated). We might not be able to feasibly establish contact with such a race, but just hearing thier long lost messages would be fascinating.
Personally I think SETI@Home is interesting, but not really worth my time. I would rather suppport things like Folding@Home. But I respect their vision, I think it's unlikely, but I must conceed that it is feasible. Your attack is just mean spirited and not very convincing.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
> eeecivdnd
Since when is 'evidenced' a word?!
Because climate models matter, if we care about whether global warming is really happening or not:
-- Who am I? How did I get here? My God, what have I done?!
= 9J =
Just because PI is infinitely long, and contains a non repeating set of digits, does not mean that it contains all possible sequences of digits.
Here's a sequence that is also infinitely long and is non-repeating: 1221112222111112222221111111...
It does not contain the Linux source code "number."
At least SETI@home had an OS/2 port and ports for lots of other 'out there' OS's. BOINC does not. This leaves out all those lovers of esoteric OS's... for now.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)