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.""

Comments

Well, that's sort of the point.

[Mr Guy]

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.