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SETI@home Becomes Part of BOINC

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the hard-to-choose dept.

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."

22 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. BOINC blows by Mursk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Does anyone else think this is a bad idea? I've been a SETI@home user for a while now. I tried the BOINC client, and it's much more complicated than the old one. I'm not sure if I will continue when they shut down the old system...

    --
    "This thing does science so hard, you say, 'I've never seen that much science.'" -Sam
    1. Re:BOINC blows by Eravnrekaree · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:BOINC blows by Darth_brooks · · Score: 4, Interesting

      and i've been using this boinc thingy for like months now to run my seti ... so where exactly is the news here ?

      The news is that old Seti is finally dying, and not in the silly "netcraft confirms" way, but finally going away.

      The comments about the move over the few threads that have talked about it are freaking hilarious. I've never seen so many (reasonably) tech savvy people turn into 85 year old codgers. "My Opteron processes 14 Seti@home classic units to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!"

      Seti Classic hasn't been doing anything productive for *years*. The work units you were running were validations and revalidations of already validated workunits. You may as well have created 500 blank word documents and set up a windows task to copy them from one partition to another for all the good it was doing. The "real" work was moved over to BOINC long ago. Classic is dead, remember how cool it was, and move on.

      What I can't figure out is how people are having problems figuring out BIONC. Download BIONC. Install. Sign up with whatever @Home project you're interested in using. Go back to BOINC, attach to project using account key that was e-mailed to you (or e-mail address.). Walk away and wait for client to it's thing. Sometimes, especially during /. mentions, the servers at the various projects take a big hit as hordes of users sign up and try to grab the client, resulting in "no work from project" messages, but that's the worst I've seen.

      Seti seems to have taken care of their last few bottlenecks, and opening up the old servers to start doing something useful should take care of the rest of any other capacity issues they've had. BOINC has been a huge improvement over classic. You can't fake results to run up your "score", the client is much more responsable when it runs out of work (trying to reconnect at growing random intervals during an outage, instead of constantly hammering away like a screaming toddler), and workunit queueing is handled within BOINC instead of through a third party system. I kinda miss the command line client, but that's about it.

      --
      There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
    3. Re:BOINC blows by jim_deane · · Score: 3, Informative

      Another issue is that BOINC requires fairly modern hardware. I kept some older computers around specifically to crunch Seti@Home packets for a long time, including an overdriven 486 DX/2-66 (nee 5x86/133).

      Now, crap, even my daily desktop (built in early 2002) is hardly up to the task. Considering that I started crunching packets in 1999, I'd really [i]like[/i] to continue, but I'm not going to buy hardware just to keep up with Seti@Bloat.

      Jim

    4. Re:BOINC blows by Almost-Retired · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I have to concur heartily. Not to mention that while boinc has a message board one can take problems to, the answers, when occasionally given are meant to make the user feel about 1/8" tall. So when it gets shut down, I guess I'll just reclaim the drive space. Which frankly, tends to pi$$ me off as I'm currently ranked at 99.363% in the world rankings.

      When I first started this, about a month after the project went public, I thought maybe it might be worthwhile. But now that I see the data is from a rather narrow band around the ecliptic and not from the whole sky, I'm not so sure we'll find anything in the more sterile environs of the milky way. To much sterilizing radiation down in the inner core for anything to have time to grow into something we might want to meet in between supernovas. Something we might not want to meet, maybe...

      --
      Cheers, Gene

  2. Car key edition by wardk · · Score: 3, Funny

    I want it to find my keys. and that sock that I know went into the dryer.

  3. Lose members by op12 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wonder how many members they'll lose as a result of the switch. Is there an easy transition from one to the other (i.e. in the form of an upgrade/update), or are they making previous SETI users go and download a new program/screensaver?

    1. Re:Lose members by Eddy+Da+KillaBee · · Score: 5, Funny

      Scientific Progress Goes BOINC?

    2. Re:Lose members by valisk · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Truthfully I doubt that they will lose members.
      And I dont think the transition is a problem, you simply create an account on the new Seti@home site and link it to your old one so that your credit is transferred over, Then download Boinc and insert your project and ID code and it does the rest.
      I switched over to Boinc in March or April and since then have had no problems at all. old Seti credit is transported across when you sign into the Boinc account version of Seti, and you can compile and run optimized clients for your architecture, something the old seti never really had.
      I got a 35% performance increase by switching to an optimized client.

      Boinc itself isn't really a replacement for seti though, it is simply a manager
      You choose which projects you wish to subscribe to, and how long you want any particular project to hog resources for and away you go.
      At first i ran seti alone, but recently I have been running the Einstein@home and LHC@Home client on a 33% resource share basis with Seti.
      Einstein, looks for spinning Pulsars and the LHC is a client from CERN running simulations of particles spinning around the new Six Track large hadron colider.
      The LHC project has just finished sadly, but I think I'll move onto the Rosetta project, which is looking to work out various protein structures and interactions and how they can be used.

      If, like me, you always fancied running a few other projects other than Seti but didnt want the hassle of manually deciding which client ot run then Boinc is a real boon and well worth the few minutes needed to set it up.

      Have a go, I think you will like it!

      --

      Economic Left/Right: -0.62
      Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.69
    3. Re:Lose members by Xzzy · · Score: 4, Informative

      > 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.

    4. Re:Lose members by MasterDirk · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Truthfully I do think that they will lose members. They can either:

      1. Create a new account on the new site (active involvement)
      2. Link new account to old account (involves remembering things)
      3. Download Boinc (go out and get something new)
      4. Insert project ID code (new stuff, not previously needed)

      or they can

      1. Do nothing, everything is configured already and working by itself giving warm fozzy feeling

      I know I'm not going to bother. It's not important enough to me, although I thought it was kind of cool when I started my Seti@home account. I have since lost interest (having about a 30-minute attention-span), and been happily churning data since.

      --

      "Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life."

  4. What about emergency situations? by UR30 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Can BOINC give cpu resources in emergency situations to, e.g., computing the effects of a nuclear disaster, or an earthquake? This would greatly help in recovering from catastrophes.

    1. Re:What about emergency situations? by AuMatar · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Umm, if the disaster has already happened, you don't need to model the results- just step outside. There's nothing a computer can do to help here.

      --
      I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
  5. More Practical Matters by Prospero's+Grue · · Score: 4, Interesting
    As much as I admire the SETI project, and it's use of idle computing; using the time and power for climate issues and the search for other planets do seem more "useful" tasks.

    Still...won't be quite the same as when some guys in my last job rigged another fellow's screen saver to flash that his computer had found an alien signal.

    sigh

    --
    The opinion above is fiction. Any similarity to real opinions, including facts and logic, is purely coincidental.
  6. Foldit by gcnaddict · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I still think we're better off folding@home than hunting afar

    --
    Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
    1. Re:Foldit by RingDev · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'm with you there. My team is in the top 2k. And the nice thing about Folding is that they actually write research papers based on the findings. Its nice to see my PC working for something that is improving the scientific community's knowledge.

      -Rick

      --
      "Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
    2. Re:Foldit by jmt9581 · · Score: 4, Informative
      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.

      --

      My blog

  7. BOINC could be a lot more efficient by k2enemy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They should take advantage of the basic economic idea of comparative advantage. In economics, it dictates why trade between two countries is beneficial, even if country A happens to be more efficient at producing everything than country B. What matters is not the absolute level of efficiency, but the ratio of efficiencies. It could also help out distributed computing.

    The following numbers are synthetic: I chose them to make the math easy. Let's say there are two distributed computing projects to choose from: OGR and RC5. There are also two different computers you can use to work on the projects, a G5 or a P4.

    The G5 can complete 3000 units of OGR in one hour and 1500 units of RC5
    The P4 can complete 1500 units of OGR in one hour and 1000 units of RC5.

    I have a P4 and like to work on OGR, while my friend Eliza has a G5 and prefers to work on RC5. We each fire up our distributed clients and let them run for two hours, then check our stats:

    OGR on P4: 2 hours * 1500 units/hour = 3000 OGR units
    RC5 on G5: 2 hours * 1500 units/hour = 3000 RC5 units

    Now let's see what comparative advantage has to offer. The P4's ratio of efficiencies is 1500 OGR units/hour to 1000 RC5 units/hour, or 3 OGR/2 RC5. The G5's ratio is 2 OGR/1 RC5. In other words, even though the G5 is better at both OGR and RC5, it is relatively better at OGR.

    I already know I can crunch 3000 OGR units in two hours. Instead of actually doing this, I ask Eliza to work on OGR for me while I do RC5 for her. Now what happens?

    OGR on G5: 2 hours * 3000 units/hour = 6000 OGR units
    RC5 on P4: 2 hours * 1000 units/hour = 2000 RC5 units

    This is great for me, 6000 OGR units were completed. But Eliza's not happy because the RC5 work is falling behind. What happens if she works on each project for an hour while I work on OGR for .2 hours and RC5 in the remaining time? 3300 OGR units and 3300 RC5 units get completed. That's 300 more units for each project than if we each worked on our favorites by ourselves.

    This shouldn't be too difficult to implement. With BOINC, instead of choosing which project their computer will actually work on, a user submits their project preferences. Then the client runs a series of benchmarks that determine the computer's ratios of efficiencies. These data are sent to the distributed server which determines the optimal allocation of work between all clients, while guaranteeing each client that as much or more work will be done on the project of their choice as would occur if that client worked solely on its preferred project.

    1. Re:BOINC could be a lot more efficient by goofy183 · · Score: 3, Informative

      I think the parent addressed this in their post.

      These data are sent to the distributed server which determines the optimal allocation of work between all clients, while guaranteeing each client that as much or more work will be done on the project of their choice as would occur if that client worked solely on its preferred project.

      The idea is if I want to dedicate my computer to SETI. And my computer can do 10 units/hr, my involvement in the BOINC network ensures that at least 10 more units/hr of SETI are being done. The actual work may be done by someone else's CPU which is better suited to SETI and my PC may be doing RC5 but the effect of me joining and saying I want to be 100% on SETI is at least the same, if not better.

  8. Article inaccurately titled. by justinarthur · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  9. Re:Odds of finding aliens by blork101 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The chances of anything coming from Mars were a million to one, he said.
    But still, they come.

  10. Re:SETI@Home has been using BOINC for a while by SETIGuy · · Score: 3, Informative
    In operation BOINC works fairly well but on Windows XP it kills performance in some apps.

    I get that too. It's really the Windows scheduler that's the problem. There's insufficient dynamic range between normal and idle priority. For that reason, on windows machines I usually have them set up to run only when the user is inactive.

    --
    Support SETI@home