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SETI@Home Transitions To BOINC

Posted by timothy on from the get-your-mind-out-of-the-stellar dept.

SeaDour writes "The team at SETI@Home have finally released their highly-anticipated new client software based on the BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) software platform. This new platform promises transparent version upgrades, more efficient work unit distribution, and the ability to seamlessly integrate other distributed computing projects that are also using the BOINC standard. For now, SETI@Home is allowing both the Classic and BOINC clients to run, but eventually they will shut down the Classic data server and force everyone to upgrade. You can read more about the transition here."

4 of 263 comments (clear)

  1. Re:SETI running out of Work-Units? by Thng · · Score: 5, Informative
    Not sure if this is before or after the news you heard, but for version 3.03, they added additional processing capability in the client so workunits would take longer to process
    News posting
    Text:
    Added additional science coverage. We now do a thorough search out to a chirp rate of +- 20 Hz/second. The cost of the additional coverage is that clients will take longer to process a workunit

    However, as 3.03 is rather old, I wouldn't be surprised if the new and faster computers and old clients that weren't upgraded negated some of the effect.

    thng

  2. Re:a great joke by Kiryat+Malachi · · Score: 4, Informative

    Best you'd conceivably get is a detection from one dish; without actually putting a transmitter way out in space, the confirmations that would be required (things like confirming parallax of the signal, motion of the signal consistent with it being X light years away, etc.) would require access to every radiotelescope in the world.

    Best you might get is "oh, neat, a candidate signal" until one or the other of the rejection mechanisms coughs and says "Bullshit."

    --

    ---
    Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
    (I read with sigs off.)
  3. BOINC by Sunspire · · Score: 5, Informative

    Boinc is more than just an updated Seti@Home, it's a generic delivery platform for distributed projects. That means you, yes you, can develope a BOINC app. Just gather some people to run it for you and compute away without needing any approval from the guys at Berkeley. Basically the participants enter a project URL into the BOINC application, the program then downloads your code and the crunching begins. BOINC handles all the network, workunit, results, distribution, security, versioning etc. issues for you.

    Participants can even choose to split their resources among several projects, say, Seti@Home and Folding@Home. Another thing that will also be used in the new Seti@Home is that you can have clients participating in the same project working on completely different computation sets. For example, clients that have proven themselves to have a fast workunit turnaround time and a long history of participating and that have a gigabyte or more of RAM can be given special tasks that would normally be impossible because of the high number of griefers on the net.

    --
    It's like deja vu all over again.
  4. BOINC SETI@home - Ready for Prime Time? by wintermute1974 · · Score: 3, Informative
    In the hopes that someone working on the SETI@home client reads Slashdot, I am posting my bug report about the new BOINC SETI@home client here. I tried to post a bug report on their Windows Client Forum, but the authentication routine failed to recognize my account ID when I copied and pasted it from the e-mail message I had just received. (If you don't yet have a BOINC account, it looks something like 213ed9ba2da1696f77b0d0fa3165a3ab, but no, this is NOT my real user account.)

    Anyway, enough preamble. Here's the problem:
    In the Work tab, when I right-click on the currently-running work unit, the context-sensitive menu displays one option, Show Graphics.

    When I select Show Graphics, a window pops up, the entire contents of which is black. At this point, my Windows 2000 SP4 computer freezes. CTRL-ALT-DEL doesn't bring up the Windows Security window. CTRL-SHIFT-ESC doesn't bring up the Task Manager. I can't move the mouse. The keyboard is completely unresponsive.

    Being a sucker for punishment, I sent a non-maskable interrupt to my CPU, and rebooted the machine. Then I tried the exact same steps, and got the same results. Yup, this bug is repeatable.

    So is the new client ready for prime time? Um, not really. Add the insult of the website not recognizing the account ID that it gave me to begin with and I'd say this program should stay in beta a while longer.

    A final note: If you happen to be one of the programmers for the client, and know why this problem is happening, reply here. I'd appreciate a reply.