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SETI@Home Expanding Goals With Sun's Help
GabeK writes "The Register is reporting that the SETI@home project is going to be expanding the scope of their project with the help of Sun. Sun is donating a fleet of servers to the SETI@home project for use in its new BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) project. This project will use Sun's new JXTA peer-to-peer protocol for distributed computing, and will add other functions to the project other than looking for little green men. Users will now be able to dedicate slices of their idle time to projects other than SETI, like cancer research and climate mapping." We previously mentioned early word of BOINC a couple of months back.
is BOINC really the best acronym they could come up with?
Expanding the scope of SETI@Home, eh? So like SETI@Work, SETI@Car, SETI@Vacation, SETI@LunchBreak and such? Sounds good!
From this page:
Status
BOINC is under development. The source code and bug-tracking database are available. We are currently conducting a beta test of BOINC using the SETI@home and Astropulse applications. The public release will be announced on the SETI@home web site. Several other distributed computing projects are evaluating BOINC.
Guess it will be some time yet.
..we're geeks, this is the only BOINC we're going to get.
Why don't we combine this new idea of distributed computing with a P2P network? It should be technically feasable, and then the eff people could run an ad campain such as, "The RIAA is against Kazaa. Kazaa cures cancer. Therefore, RIAA is for cancer!" similar to the campain comercial in Head of State.
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Squirrel
Yes. Yes I agree. You for one should put some clock cycles towards fixing your goddamned grammar.
Hint #1: Don't spray apostrophes everywhere. Pretend there's a worldwide shortage and use them sparingly.
"Boinc".
(extremely obvious)
Bill, shamelessly plugging.
Even if there were beings doing just that, they would be hundreds if not thousands if not millions or billions of light years away from us making any sort of coherent response to a signal meaningless.
The S in SETI stands for search, not for Speak.
The finding of a signal with non-natural origins, such as broadcasts would be on of the major scientific breakthroughs of the century. Communicating with any -if existant- "aliens" is an other story altogether.
Besides that - How many people play along in lotteries even their chances of winning are slim to none? People have a tendency to romatisize things, give 'em a break...
"The whole premise behind SETI is that there are intelligent beings 'out there' in the universe that are broadcasting their signals into space." I disagree. I think the whole promise behind SETI is that it MAY BE intelligent beings out there in the universe. How we can find then? SETI may not find then if they are, but I think that actively searching, even with very little chance of actually finding then, is a lot better than doing nothing at all to try to find the answer to that very important question: Are we alone? And at the moment SETI@HOME is the best way that I can use to give (yes, veeery smal) contribution to try to find the answer.
- no sig.
So either way SETI is unlikely to find anything meaningful. I'm with the Christians on this one. The search for extra-terrestrial life is only a substitute for the search for meaning within one's self and with one's God.
Maybe the search for meaning within one's self and with one's God (wow, not only do you assume everyone has a god, but you mean THE god with a capital G) is just a nice bush to hide your head in instead of facing up to mortality and a universe without clear meaning.
Basically you are saying we should go to church and pray to some deathcult-deity instead of listening for radio waves from outer space. Somebody did a nice mind-job on you....
Java has one key advantage over assembler: it runs everywhere. Also, depending on the JVM in use, performance may not be bad at all... I'm sure that if optimizing assembler code was worth the effort to code it, the developers could write the Win32 flavor in assembler, and provide a Java version for those who run on other platforms.
In the past SETI@home had many network problems, with Berkeley throttling down the available bandwidth for SETI... Will BOINC adress this issue? There doesn't seem to be any information about this on the BOINC pages, and additional clients will probably increase the demand for bandwith further. I guess it's feasible to place the BOINC servers outside the Berkeley network infrastructure.
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
or looked at JXTA recently,
it just got a *lot* better.
Check out the main website
and this review of JXTA 2 by DeveloperWorks
Cheers, Joel
Old S@H protocol was full of security flaws. Due to lack of verification of returned data it was possible to modify the workunits. And people did it, just to make them compute fast. In the fisrt 100 places of current Top 1000 list there is at least 10 cheaters. I've heard some time ago that approx 30% of workunits results returned to Berkeley was fake.
BOINC prevents this. S@H will now able to verify iof returned result is real or cheated.
SETI may be called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, but the data gained from it is used for various other scientific studies involving evaporating black holes and other radio wave emitting phenomena. Christian groups may call SETI useless, but then of course they are scared of its results and the effect it would have on their beliefs. And sure, the chance of finding any intelligent out there via SETI is incredibly slim. On the other hand, decoding a signal from outer space, even if we never translate it, will give us a very good idea of what direction to head when we do eventually get to exploring the universe (or more likely where our militaries decide to start pointing their guns, figuratively speaking).
East Coast Brewers
Am I the only one who read the title and thought that SETI was somehow using the Sun to pull in weaker transmissions, or maybe using it to threaten some rather anti-social aliens? :P
Considering that SETI = Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, the context was rather amusing...
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
I know i am going to get modded flamebait here, but i dont care.
What a typical fundamentalist christian statement you have there. "The search for extra-terrestrial life is only a substitute for the search for meaning within one's self and with one's God."
Translation: Dont be searching for ET you sinners, cause if you do find proof of intelligent life out there, it shoots giant fucking holes in our dogma. Thats why the catholic church, ever an institution thats quick to condemn anything that crosses their ideology, burnt
Giordano Bruno at the stake for even suggesting the possibility of intelligent life that was not on earth.
As far as your assertions that ET would of already heard us and visited us if they existed, there are MANY possibilities that can include intelligent life not traveling here for any number of reasons. But that goes into the realm of speculation. Seti is about hard science, and the seti project is extremely cautious about making any sort of claim.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
The whole premise behind SETI is that there are intelligent beings 'out there' in the universe that are broadcasting their signals into space. Even if there were beings doing just that, they would be hundreds if not thousands if not millions or billions of light years away from us making any sort of coherent response to a signal meaningless.
Communication does not have to be two way to get anything meaningful from it. Simply eavesdropping on the signals produced by an alien civilization could produce enormous benefits to mankind including but not limited to advances in the physical sciences, mathematics, and engineering.
If there were beings out there who had the capacity for interstellar travel (and that's the only kind that would matter because anything less than that would make communication impossible) they would have already found this noisy planet and if not made contact at least monitored us from a safe distance.
This is so flawed I don't even know where to start. First, interstellar travel is not a prerequisite for interstellar communication. All you need to communicate between stars is a sufficiently powerful EM wave, well within the capabilities of our current technology. Why would you have to be able to travel the stars to send an EM signal? "impossible" pfffffft whatever
Second, just because beings have mastered interstellar travel doesn't mean they have found us. I guess you think "building very fast spaceship" == "finding earth". I don't think this is the case.
So either way SETI is unlikely to find anything meaningful. I'm with the Christians on this one. The search for extra-terrestrial life is only a substitute for the search for meaning within one's self and with one's God.
Seti is great testbed for distributed computing technology, worst case. Best case it is relatively low cost R&D that could pay massive technological dividends if anything is ever found. Leave god to the preachers, this is science.
That I've had with friends - why the hell are you using your computer to look for little green men (who, even if they contact us, are near enough to come to us, and do so, will probably make us into gourmet ready-meals for their home planet, or smething) when they could be running something like the UD Cancer Project
This gives SETI more legitimacy IMO... as a fun project attatched to one with real value. Of course, I suppose Sun probably couldn't stomach donating to a commercial venture like UD, so I won't criticize them for choosing SETI.
How about a "community" distributed computing project? A true P2P thing where anyone can upload a job and have it processed by folks, and in return provide computing power to others. No centralized server and formalized infrastructure, just a bunch of geeks crunching data for each other.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
they would have already found this noisy planet and if not made contact at least monitored us from a safe distance
But space is big and time is, well, long. We have been pouring significant amounts of artificial EM into the universe for under a century. We have been actually listening in any sort of organized way for under half a century. The universe could be teeming with life - just not life that happens to be a) within 50 light-years of Earth b) in the EM-broadcasting phase of its development 50 years ago. If there was a culture at a Victorian-equivalent technological stage under a hundred light-years away, it would be completely invisible to us, and vice versa!
Remember that lots of our broadcasting was entirely accidental; a culture that is running short of bandwidth and concerned about energy consumption won't want to tie up huge chunks of it with powerful broadcasts, but will want to use it much more efficiently with short-range signals, line-of-sight, fixed lines, etc etc. It's safe to make that assumption because it's grounded in the laws of physics.
It's wise to keep an ear out, just in case.
Thankfully, we don't all think like you, and sometimes allow far-reaching ideas with no definite goal to lead us to scientific discovery. If nothing else, SETI has already undeniably advanced distributed computing.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
I'm hoping with the upgrades they will start looking for sexy green women.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
There's an idea that since your computer isn't doing anything anyway, the seti screen saver is zero cost. Not so. My CPU runs 5 degrees Centigrade hotter when running seti@home than if a basic screensaver is running. Thus there is even more strain on the hardware. Currently, about 1100 years of CPU time per day are devoted to seti@home. Not sure what the increased power usage is, but for each watt that's roughly 10 megawatt-hours per day of energy going up in smoke (or CO2). Since the idea of finding an alien signal by these means is clearly a non-starter after so many years, it's about time more justifiable projects were found.