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Interview with SETI@home Director David Anderson

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the no-life-on-planet-earth dept.

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.""

8 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. Give them a way to keep score by winkydink · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It seems that many of us are competitive enough to donate cpu time and only get back a scorecard.

    --

    "I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey

    1. Re:Give them a way to keep score by Pharmboy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "Its not the size of your results that counts, its magic in them".

      Only people with small e-peckers say stuff like that. ;)

      --
      Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
  2. Re:Power usage? by Duncan3 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    1. Yes.

    2. Lots.

    The cost is just spread out over thousands of people, instead of having them all in one place.

    --
    - Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
  3. So how far along are they? by ShatteredDream · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I have contributed probably a good 600-625 work units to them so far, and I'd like to know how far those clock cycles have gone toward the research.

    --
    Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
  4. Boinc was a bad move, IMHO by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful
    i am somebody who thinks they really made a mistake moving to BOINC. I mean, it's a good idea, but the implementation is horrific.

    SETI@Home has always had an inferior statistics system than Distributed.net, and I really think the client is also inferior. BOINC just makes it much less approachable. SETI classic and DNET both are things you can pretty seemlessly run on your parents computer, etc... BOINC requires a more elaborate registration procedure, forcing you to keep ahold of a ginormous string of characters for an account name (rather than having a simple account name / password combo) that I'm forced to search through my gmail every time i must use it.

    DNET and SETI Classic allowed you to install the client (or, even without installing, just running the client) and inputing your email addy. simple. lots of new people attracted to the project.

    i like the idea of having multiple project cores, but seriously, work on the implementation!! it shouldn't be so complicated!

  5. I wish BOINC could... by The+Lynxpro · · Score: 2, Insightful


    I wish BOINC could also be designed to use graphics cards - ala the BrookGPU project - to help with the number crunching duties.*

    Granted, it would require both Nvidia and ATi to donate with the efforts (especially ATi and their stingy Linux commitment).

    I'd love to see some old machines with all their PCI card slots filled up with 3dfx Voodoo cards and the like helping future scientific endeavors.

    *Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy the BOINC software rendering the SETI@home graphics courtesy of OpenGL, but I think there are more noble tasks the GPU could be harnessed to work on...

    --
    "Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
  6. If they're out there: by DisownedSky · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Projects like SETI at home are basically looking for signals someone is intentionally sending to us, at an "obvious" frequency and with signal structure dumbed down so a less sophisticated civilization (us, with near certainty) could recognize it as such.

    If you believe that the speed of light is a law of nature that can't be trifled with, then no civilization out there would know of our existence unless they were within (prob. well within) about 100 light years. That really cuts down the available volume of space.

    However, Fermi's paradox says that they should have already been here to visit us and have known of our existence before we had RF technology, and possibly even before we were human. If this knowledge of our existence were preserved (even updated), I'm not sure they would sit 100 light years away and beam a radio signal at us to get our attention.

    And now we're in the realm of Arthur C. Clark...

    --

    "The impossible often has a certain integrity that the merely improbable lacks" - Dirk Gently

  7. Folding @ Home by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I contribute to the Folding @ Home project; it's better than SETI -- it looks for a cure to cancer (among other terminal deseases like Cystic Fibrosis) instead of looking for aliens

    that, coupled with the fact that SETI hasn't gotten any new telescope time in , what, 3 or 4 years means that you're just re(re)cruching old SETI data

    if anyone decides to switch or start doing Folding @ Home here, please, consider signing up under my team -- team 33 -- from [H]ard|OCP (www.hardocp.com), page here: www.hardfolding.com