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

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.

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.