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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.""
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
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.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BF
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...
When you find the aliens, perhaps give all the Seti@home volunteers a good probing?
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.
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.
How timely considering Seti@home has been offline for a week and all the users have this really keen "Boinc is currently idle" floating screensaver.
Maybe they've been hacked by Aliens who didn't want to be discovered.
"I for one welcome our new alien hacker overlords."
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load "windows7"
I am actually starting project called waldo@home. It will require $100 million worth of computing power to find waldo.
Anyone want in?
K.
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.
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?
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.
You have certainly waved off a huge amount of information and theory in just two sentences. So you're basically saying that even though we've only searched approximately 0.002%* of the sky for less than a decade and found nothing, this surely disproves the possibility of other intelligent life in the universe? Do we even need to do the math here? SETI and any program like it are all long shots, and there's no way to prove them wrong, only eventually right, unless of course through some cosmic joke there really never was, is, or will be life elsewhere in the galaxy. In order to detect intelligent life via signals from space there needs to be a sufficiently advanced civ that broadcasts into space, the data needs to be strong enough to be detected by us, it needs to get to our planet within the timeframe we're listening, and we need to be paying attention to that area of the sky when this occurs, etc, etc. Life has existed on earth for millions of years, but we've only been "visible" signal-wise in the last century, it's quite possible there's another race out there but they won't even reach advanced electrical communications for another 10, 100, or 1000 years. They might have died off 10,000 years ago and we missed out chance, we can't know. We just have to keep listening and hope like hell we get lucky and hear something, but until then there's just too many variables for one to simply dismiss the case for extraterrestrial life just because we can't hear it.
*regarding the % searched, I'm sure SETI has a number on this somewhere, but it's got to be super small, the sky is, after all, absolutely ginormous.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
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?
alexc
Join Majestic-12 Distributed Search Engine
My reason for running SETI: If I find ET, maybe, just maybe I might have a chance to meet Jodie Foster. I'm sure some math genius out there can work it the statistics (close to zero), but in a Dumb & Dumber kind of way... I still have a chance..
-- somewhat_distant
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!
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*
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
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.
I see some comments about S@h's recent bugs, and come on its still somewhat in beta (as S@h classic still runs right next to it, new sign ups are forced to use the BOINC client but classic is still open to current members) thats no excuse, but it helps to explain some of the strain.
Its not really about seti@home anymore, they had a system set up that worked more or less for them since 99. What they are really doing is removing the enormous cost (enormous even after its been reduced from a direct super computer) of setting up a distributed computing network, up until boinc it was tons of different standards that each in house dev team had to make from scratch. boinc is a system that lowers the cost (in terms of time and knowledge) to enter the distributed market.
This is a mostly good thing, unless you have some n00bs like BURP (rendering project) that make a bug that nukes your local machine account info. This is mostly balanced out by the ability to run multiple projects at once, a good example is that seti@home has been down for about a week, but BOINC still runs and you can run other projects seamlessly.
In 5 years it will be even easier to enter the distributed market, you will never see BOINC or its derivatives take over classical supercomputers, but as the costs go down you will see much more innovative uses for this computing power.
There is truth in humor.
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.
;-) would be better off; users get an actual financial gain, and the company gets huge resources for comparatively little money.
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
so why don't we see things like this, even after all these years?
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---