SETI@home Becomes Part of BOINC

Sudoku writes "On December 15th the Seti@home project will stop issuing new work to members and integrate with BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. Once members have moved over to the BOINC client they can divide their computing time between such projects as climate prediction, search for gravitational signals emitted by pulsars and yes, you can still look for the aliens."

Comments

Article inaccurately titled.

[justinarthur]

SETI@Home joined the BOINC project long ago, at least a year ago. There has also been an account migration service since the beginning of the BOINC integration. The only news here is that they are discontinuing support for the old SETI@Home client.

Re:Lose members

[Xzzy]

> BOINC isn't trivial, but it's not hard either.

I honestly don't see how they're going to attact anyone except nerds to run their software.

It's crap, the documentation is crap, and you can really only figure it out through trial and error. The main BOINC page has a "software" section, but no link to actually download the clients. Instead, they elected to stash the client download link below the list of available projects. So you sort that out, get the client, and run it.

I don't know what it's like for the other projects, but their dumb little wizard for signing onto a project doesn't work at all with seti@home. It says to enter an URL, without clearly explaining that the URL is merely the homepage of the project. So I just guessed by cutting and pasting off the BOINC home page and happened to get it right. Well, so one would think. It never gave positive confirmation. Then it takes you to this little login screen, and I immediatley tried to log in with my old seti@home account. The software thinks about that for a minute, then presents you with a generic communication error and no clue on what to do next. So I tried to make a new account.. same generic error. I only discovered you have to go to the seti@home page and "migrate" your account to the new system by going to the seti@home webpage, looking for some hint on how to proceed. Few minutes later, after filling out a number of forms and getting a "key" in my email, I pasted it into the BOINC wizard and was finally able to attach to the project.

Again, not one single bit of this is documented in a clear format. Only random trial and error figured it out. Even their "help" page is little more than a high brow explanation of the software and the mechanics of how the system functions. Like I said, only nerds are going to take the time to figure this thing out.

At least the old seti@home was as simple as double clicking a file and entering an email address, something easily graspable by your average schmoe.

Re:BOINC blows

[Eravnrekaree]

I thought the BOINC client was a useability disaster when I tried it. It had numerous technical problems and was very unintiutive. While some may say that people should how to work with its unnecessarily involved configuration, I think this is is an arrogant assumption, especially for people who are DONATING their computers resources, if it isnt easy to install and provide some good graphics to show what it is doing, people will not bother and will give up, and the project will use a lot of users. The reason seti@home was such a success, was due to the fact it didnt require much user configuration to run (but was still configurable) and provide a nice graphics display to show that it was doing something. With BOINC the graphics display seemed to be difficult to access, and the whole thing seemed to involve a lot of configuration to use. I think the seti@home project will lose a large number of users from this.

Re:Foldit

[jmt9581]

While I agree that folding@home is more useful than seti@home, I think that Rosetta@home. It's also focused on protein folding, but the difference is that Rosetta has consistently outperformed folding@home at the CASP (Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction) competitions. Check out the CASP website to see the raw results. Or, check out a summary from the Baker Lab website. Also, Dr. David Baker (head of the lab where Rosetta has been developed) is very involved in the community of users that run Rosetta@home, check the messageboards on the Rosetta@home site.

Disclaimer: I'm a student in David's lab. But that doesn't mean that I'm wrong, or mindlessly plugging my own Kool-Aid. :) I really believe that Dr. Baker and his lab have a strong chance to solve the protein folding prediction problem.

Whatever project you choose to donate your cycles to in the end, protein science is a cool field with far-reaching implications for humans in general, and the scientists in the field really appreciate your cycles. Thanks to all those who are donating and will donate in the future.