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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
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 carried on using the old client, it still works. (I couldn't get BOINC to work either).
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
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.
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.
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.
@de_machina
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 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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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'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." ---
So do I. In fact I keep looking for people to help us develop this.... To no avail. :( Aparently the people who want this most don't have the ability to implement it, and the people who have the ability (assuming they exist) aren't interested.
If anyone wants to help, join the boinc_opt mailing list and send a message.
BTW, David is the titular director of SETI@home, but currently has no managerial duties beyond the BOINC project.
Support SETI@home