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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 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 love it too, I was running the Climate Prediction along with SETI... but now I've switched over to the Enstein one. http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/
From the Site:
Einstein@home is a program that uses your computer's idle time to search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors.
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.
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.
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.
Support SETI@home