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Interview with SETI@home Director David Anderson
CowboyRobot writes "ACM's Queue magazine interviews David P. Anderson, a research scientist at the U.C. Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, who directs the SETI@home and BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) projects. SETI@home uses hundreds of thousands of home computers in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. FTA: "volunteer computing arose because projects such as SETI@home needed $100 million worth of computing power but didn't have the money. But there's no free lunch--a project must give participants something in return for their computer time.""
I was a seti@home classic user and switched to BOINC. It allows you to run multiple projects of all different types and apportion percentages of your resources to all the projects you subscribe to. It allowed me to perform some protein folding (which some might find more useful) while looking for ET. There are some climate modeling and I think interferometer processing may also be available. I think BOINC needs to add control of CPU utilization parameters, but it is a great step foward from the single-use screen saver distributed computing we've had up to now.
I carried on using the old client, it still works. (I couldn't get BOINC to work either).
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
I have a 45 watt CPU. I'm going to assume for simplicity's sake that all other power drain is roughly equal and they only burning CPU time. We'll say, for the ease of the numbers, it burns 4 watts idle, so the ramp up to full cpu is 41 watts. That gives me 1 Kilowatt-hour per day. I pay about 8 cents a kilowatt-hour. So the way I figure it, for my two computers, I'm donating about $2.40 a month to cancer research with folding@home.
Never confuse volume with power.
Calling it a resource hog may not be the right term depending on what resources you are talking about. The whole point of the programs is to run your CPU to max when it would be otherwise idle. In that sense you are deliberately contributing to the wear and tear of your system, as well as any heating issues you may be concerned about. You are choosing to offset this against the value of the research, which is why I can't understand why people will donate cycles to SETI and not to something more directly useful like folding@home, but that's a value judgement.
It, however, should NOT be a resource hog in the sense of Microsoft Office, in that it slows down other programs. These programs are designed to utilize any resources you aren't using, and immediately give them back if you need to use them. This is done by setting the priority of the process just over system idle. Any cycles that would be spent idle are spent on processing instead, but when a program wants cycles, it gives them up.
Never confuse volume with power.
You have certainly waved off a huge amount of information and theory in just two sentences. So you're basically saying that even though we've only searched approximately 0.002%* of the sky for less than a decade and found nothing, this surely disproves the possibility of other intelligent life in the universe? Do we even need to do the math here? SETI and any program like it are all long shots, and there's no way to prove them wrong, only eventually right, unless of course through some cosmic joke there really never was, is, or will be life elsewhere in the galaxy. In order to detect intelligent life via signals from space there needs to be a sufficiently advanced civ that broadcasts into space, the data needs to be strong enough to be detected by us, it needs to get to our planet within the timeframe we're listening, and we need to be paying attention to that area of the sky when this occurs, etc, etc. Life has existed on earth for millions of years, but we've only been "visible" signal-wise in the last century, it's quite possible there's another race out there but they won't even reach advanced electrical communications for another 10, 100, or 1000 years. They might have died off 10,000 years ago and we missed out chance, we can't know. We just have to keep listening and hope like hell we get lucky and hear something, but until then there's just too many variables for one to simply dismiss the case for extraterrestrial life just because we can't hear it.
*regarding the % searched, I'm sure SETI has a number on this somewhere, but it's got to be super small, the sky is, after all, absolutely ginormous.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
Ahhh, but SETI is looking for aliens who are trying to talk to us. Setting up a beacon that targets a set of stars and sends them a message, each in succession, repeating for millions of years doesn't seem that far-fetched or difficult - no moving parts are required, after all, all it would take is good radiation shielding for the computer.
The signal could be quite strong indeed, if based on someplace like Mercury, from just solar power. With just a 100m square array ET could be 200 light years out with your assumptions, and that's something a lone nutjob could set up given reasonable space trave technology. A government-sized effort could be several orders of magnitude better.
SETI is interesting precisely because it should be pretty easy to find any alien life that wants to be found, and yet we keep not finding it.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I see some comments about S@h's recent bugs, and come on its still somewhat in beta (as S@h classic still runs right next to it, new sign ups are forced to use the BOINC client but classic is still open to current members) thats no excuse, but it helps to explain some of the strain.
Its not really about seti@home anymore, they had a system set up that worked more or less for them since 99. What they are really doing is removing the enormous cost (enormous even after its been reduced from a direct super computer) of setting up a distributed computing network, up until boinc it was tons of different standards that each in house dev team had to make from scratch. boinc is a system that lowers the cost (in terms of time and knowledge) to enter the distributed market.
This is a mostly good thing, unless you have some n00bs like BURP (rendering project) that make a bug that nukes your local machine account info. This is mostly balanced out by the ability to run multiple projects at once, a good example is that seti@home has been down for about a week, but BOINC still runs and you can run other projects seamlessly.
In 5 years it will be even easier to enter the distributed market, you will never see BOINC or its derivatives take over classical supercomputers, but as the costs go down you will see much more innovative uses for this computing power.
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So do I. In fact I keep looking for people to help us develop this.... To no avail. :( Aparently the people who want this most don't have the ability to implement it, and the people who have the ability (assuming they exist) aren't interested.
If anyone wants to help, join the boinc_opt mailing list and send a message.
BTW, David is the titular director of SETI@home, but currently has no managerial duties beyond the BOINC project.
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