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

Patent Rights

[computer_redneck]

I'll take a share of any items that they patent as a result of SETI. Residuals ought to help pay for new computers down the line for me.

New client

[fatwreckfan]

Am I the only one that stopped participating once they switched to this new client they use now? I couldn't get it to work on either my work or home computers...

Re:New client

[Billy the Impaler]

That's how it was for me. BOINC wouldn't run properly. I guess I didn't try hard enough or something. After a bit of trying I decided to switch to Folding@Home instead. I like the client better and, in my opinion, the science is more beneficial to humanity.

Re:New client

[demachina]

I stopped running SETI once I figured out what a needle in a haystack search it is. They are looking for a few specific waveforms on a very narrow frequency band. There isn't a particularly strong chance that aliens would share in their thinking on what signal to send and happen to do it in the same time frame.

I'm all for donating spare CPU cycles but I would rather it went to something that had a better chance of having a point like molecular biology research.

Re:New client

[lgw]

SETI is actually looking on the frequency band that makes sense, given the nearby stars have already been searched more broadly. Remember, SETI is only listening for aliens who are trying to send us a message, not looking for radio traffic leaking from some alien planet.

Anyone doing radio astonomy is going to be listening on or near the 21cm "hydrogen band", as there's only "a very narrow frequency band" that works for radio astronomy at any distance. If you're going to send a signal to someone you know noting about, this is the one frequency range that you can be sure they'll be listening on, if they're listening at all. It's not just chosen arbitrarily.

Certainly, the chance of finding alien intelligence after we checked the easy targets is small - small enough that I'm happy SETI is orivately funded, not fighting for funds from the NSF. But for a volunteer effort, support what makes you happy to support.

Power usage?

[Rikkochet]

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't utilizing 100% of a CPU result in a significant increase in power consumption on the system versus the processor simply being idle? Sure, it's nothing compared to leaving your big CRT monitor on, but still.. I definitely notice my CPU and case temperatures are substantially higher when I have high CPU utilization going on - I can't help but wonder how much energy we're actually consuming here.

Re:Power usage?

[squidfood]

What about the cost to the environment?

From this link a good average differential between a processor at load and idle is 40W. If you turn the computer off instead, that's maybe 80W. (Broad average over many computers).

Now Here we see that 2million years of computing time has been used, so (times 40W/hr) that comes to 700,000MWHr.

No the 2000 U.S. consumption of energy was ~21 billion MWHr. (Here, and trust the government to use quadrillions of BTUs as a unit). So to date, SETI has used 0.003% of U.S. annual energy consumption. And that's almost enough energy to power the City of Red Deer, Alberta for 17 months! Someone else can tell us how many libraries of congress you could have read with that much light.

Feel free to check my units and zeros, I've been wrong before, as long as someone can tell the Brits what a quadrillion is.

SETI@Home is crap since BOINC came into the pictur

[marlinSpike]

I've been a SETI@Home volunteer for several years... since 1998, I think, and I've unofficially clocked over 10,500 hours of time -- unofficially that is, because ever since BOINC came into the picture, I've not been getting any credit for my work units. I've tried BOINC, and other than the fact that it's a piece of buggy crap, I hate it, and won't have it on my computer.

SETI was just fine with it's old client -- this may just be a how-to on how to loose a loyal following! SETI@Home no longer runs on my computers, and it's because I feel that the little the organizers had to do to give a "Thank You", was not being done, so why continue?

Why do you expect to find anything? Time is vast!

[redelm]

The numbers don't look good: Our most powerful RTs (NM array) can barely pickup Voyager broadcasting 5W from Neptune. Even if ET is putting 1 MW in a roughly equivalent antenna dispersal, she can only be 0.2 light-year away. Give her 1e4 better efficiency/aiming, and she could be 21 light-years.

There probably several hundred stars in this volume, IMHO some of which will have/had intelligent life. But how long are they going to keep at it with directional RT transmitters?? I'd guess maybe 1000 years. But that's out of a 5 billion year stellar cycle! Not only is space vast, but so is time. Planetary evolutions _will_ be out-of-phase by millions & billions of years.

Good, but what's the results?

[atw]

Disclaimer -- I run a distributed search engine project so my opinion is biased.

It was noted above that while there are plenty of CPU sucking projects they don't seem to have end results that can actually be used in daily life.

OK, d.net proved the point by breaking crypto that was thought to be too strong. Fine, done that, why waste CPU cycles further?

SETI@Home -- okay, its cool to search for aliens, but lets be realistic here -- its cool, but not exactly useable.

Lots of effort, heck, lots is too small of a word to describe amount of CPU that went into these projects! Cool scoreboards, teams etc, but what are the end results for millions of users after good 10 years of d.net's existance!?!?! Not much.

This is why I created my own project to build something that I use every day -- search engine. I can live without aliens or crypto, but I sure as hell can't live without a good WWW search engine. Can you?

cpu time for money?

[N3wsByt3]

I've been a contributor to seti@home when it just started for some years. Maybe I was just being idealistic (and young ;-) but I thought it was a cool project. I still do, more or less, but..well, you know how it goes. After some years, I had to fix or reinstall my computers, and somehow, I never downloaded it again. Maybe I just lost interest too, and then with that more user-unfriendly boinc system, I just thought to myself it's not worth the trouble anymore. After all, it DOES cost you something, and let's face it; after years, there is still little to show for.

I have always been wondering, though, why *commercial* companies don't see the value in such distributed cpu systems? I mean, there are, for instance, commercial genetic-engineering companies, trying to solve the riddle of DNA strings... which usually costs a lot, for computertime on supercomputers. Now, it would seem to me that a system like boinc (but not exactly boinc, because I think it's not allowed for commercial use) would be financially a far better deal. Just give the 'users' some mild financial gain, and they will have a userbase by the millions in no time, while for the company itself it would still be cheaper then if they had to pay for regular supercomputer-time.

So, everybody (well, at least the capitalists ;-) would be better off; users get an actual financial gain, and the company gets huge resources for comparatively little money.

so why don't we see things like this, even after all these years?

Re:More Ambitious Project: STI

[utnow]

"I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force- if necessary- to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security."

Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Oct. 9, 2002