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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."
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
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.
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.
I still think we're better off folding@home than hunting afar
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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.
.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.
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
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.
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.
Scientific Progress Goes BOINC?
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!
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> 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.