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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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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The fake Gzip Christ isn't not user number ~0xA6CA7
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.
Or am I just missing the sarcasm?
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?
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/
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.
Well you better shut your computer down and quit posting on slashdot. Every little bit counts right? Wouldn't want contribute to global warming in any way. Might as well get rid of the computer and tv (if you have one). Back to oil lamps and candles. Of course, production of those is done in factories often which requires power to run so we better not bother with that. You might as well roll your own candles if you need any light while it's dark out to do something like read a book. Make sure you don't buy any books coming off a printing press though. Those things require power to run nowadays. Can you believe it? It's insane! Maybe the best idea is to stand in the middle of a square foot chunk of land and just wait until the whole world magically becomes better. Anyways, back to my mud hut for the night.
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
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