Is Distributed Computing Being Distributed Badly?

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Distributed computing could help researchers studying climate change or Alzheimer's, but SETI@home's search for extra-terrestrial intelligence continues to dominate. Wall Street Journal columnist Lee Gomes says that's a big waste, especially because SETI doesn't seem likely to yield results: 'This continued fascination with living-room SETI comes as professional setiologists concede that early assumptions about the search for intelligent life -- notably those popularized by astronomer Carl Sagan -- have proven naively optimistic. For instance, it's now conceded there is little chance of detecting the "leaking" transmissions of another planet -- its version of "I Love Lucy" broadcasts. Those signals are too weak to stand out from the universe's background noise.' Gomes also traces the origins of SETI@home to Berkeley computer scientist David P. Anderson, and explains that users stuck with the ET search rather than medical investigations in part because of nationalistic competition. Yet Anderson no longer runs SETI@home. 'Instead, he donates his spare computer power to a global warming project. But he doesn't presume to tell others what they ought to be doing with their CPU cycles.'"

Comments

Well excuse me

[Black Parrot]

for using my computer to do what I want to do with it.

Re:Well excuse me

[LarsWestergren]

Regardless of what they do with the data, or where they release it, most likely some company will go through all the data/findings, and figure out a way to use the information. At that point it will be patented, and locked up for years to come. All the time we put in, running our computers at 100%, will be wasted, on drugs that we can't afford.

By objections to this:

a) You don't know for sure that will/can happen.
b) If the steps taken to take this research and create a anti-cancer drug from it were obvious, it would be an outcry if the US pantent office gave the patent to a single company.
c)Even if this worst-case scenario did happen, the cycles donated would not be wasted. You would have helped advance human scientific research, and the medicines created would still be saving peoples' lives.

Just like donations to charities

[Chrisq]

I don't like the way that some animal charities get more money than children's charities. Obviously the people making donations disagree. The point is the donor decides, if someone is giving something away then they decide.

Re:Just like donations to charities

[Trailwalker]

"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man."
-- Mark Twain

Still true today.

Journalist's opinion is better (not)

[FlynnMP3]

This is merely an opinion piece. It's easy to take the pragmatic road and dontate personal computing cycles to cancer research or something as equally earth based - citing return of results arguments.

I postulate that the returns for finding out if there is intelligent life in outer space has greater implications for the world's population. Not immediate concerns mind you (unless something extraordinary happens), but the practical usage will eventually seep out of the acedemic and scientific circles and benefit the population in ways that we cannot possibly imagine.

The opinion the journalist writes is the simple (IMO shallow) doubts of doing science for it's own sake.

Besides, this whole opinion is practically moot. There are MORE than enough extra computing cycles out there. People can choose to which project they wish to donate too. Slow news day perhaps.

-FlynnMP3

Re:Crunching for their profit

[the_humeister]

There's a logical fallacy in there somewhere. Just because it's coming from the WSJ doesn't mean the point isn't valid. And I would have to agree with them, because I think there are better ways to spend extra computer cycles than searching for possible signals from outer space. I'd rather see extra cycles go towards things that have a larger impact for people on Earth: weather analysis, drug creation, protein folding, etc. But that's just me.

Re:It is a waste...

[The Mysterious X]

It may be a lost cause, but it's *their* lost cause.
They support seti for the same reason that they support Soccer/Baseball teams that never have a hope of winning anything, it's more sentimental than logical.

People are using their things wrong

[MightyYar]

It's a waste that people use their cars to go see a movie when they could be delivering food to the homeless shelter.

It's a waste that people are storing ice cream in the fridge when they could be storing donated blood plasma.

Re:Crunching for their profit

[Otter]

As one of those pharmaceutical researchers, I assure you that it does not make one particle of difference to us (let alone the Wall Street Journal) whether or not some overclocker runs some "fighting cancer" thingy on his computer. If there were a computational problem that we cared about, we'd throw a cluster at it, not wait for a bunch of squabbling AMD and Intel fanboys to solve it.

And as for global warming, I'm no climatologist but I've got to think that turning your damn computer off is more valuable than anything you could run on it.

coming from a cancer survivor

[PortWineBoy]

However they do it, whatever it takes. Drug companies weren't formed for altruistic reasons.

Re:coming from a cancer survivor

[indifferent children]

Drug companies weren't formed for altruistic reasons.

I suspect that for the older drug companies, altruism was a major factor in their founding. Those people who cry that our society is becoming less civilized are right, but they neglect to mention that "the fish rots from the head." Compare these quotes by Andrew Carnegie to today's "Death Tax" opponents: "Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community." and "The man who dies rich dies disgraced."

Individuals like Warren Buffet, George Soros, and Bill Gates (yes, boo hiss, his software sucks, but he understands that a charitable foundation is a better use for ridiculous amounts of wealth than creating the next Paris Hilton) stand out today as exceptions to the "Greed is good." attitude that dominates.

Re:Crunching for their profit

[TubeSteak]

I think his point was that since pharmas make billions of dollars in pure profit, they can afford to invest some of it in highpowered computing clusters.

Nobody is going to do the same for SETI.

I bet the pharmas could even write it off on their taxes.

Re:Crunching for their profit

[Hythlodaeus]

Odd, I can think of few things that would change life on earth more than a verifiable intelligent signal from outer space.

This story reminds me to go download SETI@home again.

Re:More than one

[Shisha]

Actually I see the problem as being two-fold. All those free computer cycles are not that free. Modern CPUs consume more electricity to do more work and someone has to pay the electricity bills. Busy CPUs need more cooling and fans that run at full throttle for a year do wear out and fail (and you risk burning some important component, even if the PC is designed to shut down when it detects overheating). That's simply because desktop PCs are desktop PCs and not workstations and the assumption is that the fans will have to run at full throttle for maybe half an hour at a time. The real costs are not easy to work out, but it might, just might be more efficient to donate the money to charity.

The other problem is deciding which project deserves most attention. I think it's well beyond me to judge whether computer time is better spent running climate change simulations or protein folding for some medical research. Hence if someone wishes to donate computer time it will be useful if all one had to do is to download a BOINC like client that will then run whatever the server sends it. Of course you'd need a reputable institution with a sensible scientific board running the server...

Reasons to be cheerful...

[Anonymous Coward]

Number 1 - The Seti Experiment was not a waste. We now know that there are no signals of the kind we were hoping for in the areas we looked at. This is a finding. It is not a failure. Do not underestimate the importance of negative results in science.

Number 2 - Seti was the seed-corn for the whole concept of doing scientific computing as a distributed calculation. It was directly responsible for the development of BOINC, which is a very valuable tool for all the scientific community.

Re:Crunching for their profit

[random_culchie]

I hope everyone see that they are not simply donating spare cycles that cost you nothing.

Modern computers enter a powersaving mode in the times their CPU is not busy. Enabling Folding@Home or SETI@HOME on your machine consumes these powersaving cycles and draws more power.

Leave these programs running for a month and check out the huge difference in your power bill.

Ironically, the distributed system to calculate climate change could actually contribute to it!!

The assumptions of SETI

[elrous0]

There are so many problems with the assumptions behind SETI, it's hard to even know where to begin. But one big assumption (aside from assuming radically different alien life uses the same radio spectrum to communicate that we do, that they coexist with us in essentially the same timeframe, etc.) is the assumption that we would even RECOGNIZE an alien signal if we saw it.

Sure, we look for patterns. But a radically different intelligence might communicate in a way that seems random to us. Hell, they might have discovered or evolved whole mathematical systems that would seem chaotic or meaningless to even our brightest minds.

-Eric

Re:Crunching for their lives

[Frosty Piss]

I currently work for a pharmaceutical company, and in a visit to a research lab I learned just how much computing power they throw at these problems. They do have supercomputers, intranet clusters, etc. to try to solve these problems. They are so incredibly complex, however, that those are not enough.

Well, maybe if the pharmaceutical companies threw a little more of their obscene profits at the problem, it would be enough. The Board of Directors and the stockholders might have to cut back on Cuban cigars, though...

Re:And yet, other researchers disagree

[Otter]

Note that Stanford University, Washington University and Munich University are universities, not pharmaceutical companies. (Stop me if I'm going too fast for you!) From the point of view of an academic research lab, investing some essentially free grad student programming time to possibly generate a paper might make sense. For the pharmaceutical companies the OP is spinning his paranoid fantasies about, it makes zero sense.

Honestly, it always amazes me how some people are willing to spend so much time cutting and pasting and href'ing, and none on reading.

Re:More than one

[gzur]

I upgraded from the old SETI@Home client to BOINC when it became available - but the BOINC client required too much effort on my part and was getting in my way.

I know you what you're gonna say, I guess could have configured it better, RTFM, yadda yadda, but that's the point really isn't?

I'm donating my CPU cycles to some altruistic cause, I don't want to have to RTFM. I just want to install and forget. For this reason I miss the old SETI client, and have, as a result, now stopped contributing.

I simply can't be bothered.

There wouldn't be other projects without SETI@home

[__aahrlq8808]

Imagine where distributed computing would be today without the high-profile trailblazer, SETI@home. I remember reading several articles in 1999 about the project in the New York Times among other places. SETI@home's unique goal and approach attracted members, and with those, more attention for its size. Over 5.2 million have participated in the project, and in all likelihood 5 million of those were new to distributed computing.

While SETI@homes's managed to retain nearly a million members, the claim that it steals participants from other projects is absurd. Most of those other projects would face far greater obstacles to acceptance by having to woo new participants not already familiar with DC. Probably the originators of those other projects would not have even heard of DC themselves, or at least would have started several years later without a clear success story to look up to.

Inaccurate

[FreeUser]

If we as a race are any indication, and we're all we have to go by, it's safe to assume the opposite. The more advanced we've become, the less valuable human life has become.

As others have said, Bullshit with a capital "B".

• War - While wars go on today, they are less acceptable to most. 100 years ago war was considered an integral part of diplomacy. Today it is consider a failure of diplomacy
• Human Rights - 100 years ago it was an alien concept. Even with the Bill of Rights in the US, and the Magna Carta in the UK, there was always the presumption that "others" (be they of a different religion, ethnicity, or nationality) had less rights than "us." A universal set of rights that applied to everyone was not a mainstream idea.
• Slavery As others have said, it isn't legal in too many places these days (is it anywhere), and its practice is fringe and utterly unacceptable. 300 years ago the opposite was true, and 600 years ago it was nearly ubiquitious
• Women's Rights Women were property a century ago, with no right to vote in most places, and no right to choose. Instead they were property of their husbands (and unable to own property of their own in many places), and their bodies became chattal of the state and church for nine months the moment they got pregnant. While there are those that seek to revert to such a state, even in right-leaning America 70% of the population opposes such a move, and in more enlightened countries the notion is even less acceptable.

I could go on (the acceptability of massive civilian casualties during the first two wars, up to and including the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, vs. the unacceptability of even modest collatoral damage today, etc. etc.), but you get the idea. Human life has seldom if ever been prized so highly as it is today.

For the love of God, the level of surveillance that the anglosphere tolerates is unfathomable by the standards of 1,000 years ago.

Hardly. The surveillance was done by a different entity 1000 years ago, namely the Catholic church. Its mechanism was low-tech...guilt and mentally batter your subjects into such a perpetual state of guilt and then encourage them to go the "confession" and receive absolution. Everyone reported their sins to the local priest, and often discussed their "concerns" with said priests likewise. Even kings had their confessors...which gave the church an immense level of day-to-day surveillance of an entire continent during the middle ages that is still unrivaled even today.

Even 50, 20, 10 years ago (hell, today for that matter), if you think government serveillance of your life in the big city is bad (and it is IMHO very bad, and very dangerous), it is nothing to what your family and neighbors make a point of knowing about you when you live in a small community. Talk about "Big Brother", try adding "Big Aunt", "Big Sister", "Big Cousin", "Big Mother", "Big Father, "Big Neighbor", "Big Gossip Down the Street", etc. to that.

So your arguments are false on their face, and as for reasons not to venture into space, spurious and irrelevant at best. Space brings with it problems and solutions, just as the discovery of America did, and every other migration and advance of the species has over the millennia. If and when we do meet another sentient species, that too will bring with it challenges ... and the stimulus for growth that will push our species into addressing and developing further refinements in ethics, diplomacy, and the wisdom to use military force (or not) as needed. As with any challenge, we will either rise to the occasion or fail.

However, if we cower in our little corner and forsake progress because we fear it, then failure (as in the end of the species in the nearer term) is no longer merely a possibility...it becomes a certainty, and along with it our certain extinction, the next time the planet experiences one of its many recurring major disas

Re:Crunching for their profit

[lhbtubajon]

That's not a fair criticism, for two reasons:

1) If a company starts manufacturing a product so expensive that they cannot make a profit on it, they will soon cease to exist, as will the benefitial product they hoped to give to the world. So what would you have them do? Commit organizational suicide so they can manufacture medicine to cure a few people, and lose any chance of contributing to the engineering of a better, more accessible solution for the world?

2) Companies are not soul-less collections of worker drones, however much karma it may provide to claim that they are. Most of us work for companies. Most of us are not horrible, soul-less drones. Individuals within companies make decisions, and those individuals usually do the best they can to make the right decisions based on several important angles, like:
a) what is best for the people that make up this company (see #1 above)
b) what is best for the community we serve
c) what is best for the people who invested in our success

Re:Crunching for their lives

[saider]

...The Board of Directors and the stockholders might have to cut back on Cuban cigars...

It puzzles me why people who complain about the profits of various industries do not invest their money in them. If they have these record profits, why not invest in those companies and use the growth and dividends to improve your life and be able to afford the product?

It's not CPU power American medicine lacks...

[Cid Highwind]

It's political and financial willpower to do the right thing.

If there was a way to make as much money on a one-shot cancer cure as on pills to control stomach acid, we would have it now. Antibiotics are easy to develop, the test procedures have been refined by years of experience, they've been mass-produced for a hundred years now, yet no new antibiotics have gone on the market in the last 20 years. Does anyone really think science has run out of substances that kill bacteria? No, the problem is that there's no money on cures or prevention, people take them once and then recover (or don't get sick in the first place). There's far more money to be made in selling Americans with health insurance $3 purple pills to treat heartburn or baldness or enlarged prostates or to let old farts have sex until they're ninety than in saving hundreds of millions in Africa from certain death by AIDS.

If the drug companies that stand to benefit from current medical research want donated CPU cycles, then they should start acting like they really intend to develop and market (at affordable prices) a cancer cure or a vaccine for AIDS or some other miracle cure rather than yet another heavily advertised long-term treatment to help baby boomers keep pretending they aren't getting old. If they want to keep on milking the old folks' prescription drug benefits for all they're worth, they can use some of those profits to pay for supercomputer time.

Re:More than one

[York the Mysterious]

I think you're underestimating the quality of a desktop PC. I ran SETI and climateprediction.net for about 4 years straight on a dual G4 PowerMac. Ran like a champ. 100% CPU for months straight. Never had a problem. They can take abuse.