Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
I'm not going to bother, because about 20 people are about to tell you why pi is has no end.
From Mathworld: A number which is not the root of any polynomial equation with integer coefficients, meaning that it is not an algebraic number of any degree, is said to be transcendental. This definition guarantees that every transcendental number must also be irrational, since a rational number is, by definition, an algebraic number of degree one.
Once again: Irrational numbers have decimal expansions that neither terminate nor become periodic. Every transcendental number is irrational.
Pi, of course, is the most famous transcendental number of them all.
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.
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.
It definitely screws with power saving since it uses all the CPU it can get its hands on. I used to think that SETI was just a harmless bit of stupidity, not I realise it also contributes to global warming.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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/
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 :)
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/
According to The top 500 list The earth simulator is currently the most powerful super computer. According to Their site The Sustained Performance is 35.86 Tflops.
According to SETI@Home's stats its performance is 64.54 TeraFLOPS.
Not an order of magnitude, but almost twice as fast. So I guess for some problems SETI does blow away all other supercomputers. I guess since different software is running on each its not totally fair, but lacking any real evidence supporting your case we'll go with the flawed stuff... okay?
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