Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
of course the WSJ would much rather you where crunching numbers for their drugs companies under the guise of "fighting cancer" or "protein folding" so your results can be turned into their profit (you didnt think that cure/treatment would be free like your CPU did you?)
searching for ET is not profitable so it must be bad
Right now I'm attached SETI, Einstein, Rosetta & LHC. It works on one for a bit and then will switch to another for a bit. And so what if SETI@home will never find anything, it's a cool looking screen saver!
for using my computer to do what I want to do with it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Fighting fire with fire?
"Instead, he donates his spare computer power to a global warming project"
Does this attempt to determine how much global warming is being caused by donating CPU cycles.
You know what's a waste of time? Gardening. You spend all this time and energy just to raise a few tomatoes that could have been bought at the store for cheap.
People should stop gardening and focus their time and energy on solving global warming, but I don't presume to tell anyone what they should be doing with their time.
Instead, he donates his spare computer power to a global warming project.
Funny....I think that all the Slashdot gaming rigs out there are contributing quite a bit to global warming, but you don't hear us bragging about it... ^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
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.
I am doing the BBC global warming, but a lot of CPU hours got wasted when they found one of the input files was duff http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/hottopics/climatechange/up dates1.shtml DOH!,/p>
I could have wasted that time looking for aliens.
Anyway, what is that guys problem, no amount of theory will prove or disprove if aliens watch TV like us. We need to at least look for them to prove anything.
BS. Humans have shown that unless faced with a challenge, they tend to become lazy and stupid. Only a truly daunting challenge brings out the best in human nature, so it makes sense that only the challenge of facing an advanced alien race could possibly get us all together with the same agenda.
Of course there will still be the fringe whackos who actively work against the rest of the human race (we welcome our alien overlords!) but the majority always rises to the challenge and a challenge presented to everyone without bias or exclusion will get everyone's attention and focus of effort.
You make carbon based energy expensive. It's that simple.
While that isn't happening you know your government aren't taking global warming seriously and if they aren't, you should probably ask yourself why you should take it seriously.
Deleted
Maybe people don't help drug research or any other causes because they often times have the money to conduct the research. Helping find a drug, for example, to cure a disease doesn't reap any recognition for an indivdual person, but rather the drug company, for example. Ah! But find an alien in outer space and be able to communicate with it - the individual making the discovery with SETI will be recognized at a personal level. Personal gain always wins over collaborative gain. The human race is greedy by nature.
"If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit."
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
No unix/linux clients, but then I don't really want my linux boxes running at 100% anyway.
You do know what "nice" means right?
My main linux box is running at 99.7 for Distributed.net but when something else needs CPU time the dnetc process is set for maximum niceness and it gives it up.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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.
It's a waste that people are storing ice cream in the fridge when they could be storing donated blood plasma.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Personally, I always felt SETI was not very philanthropic - more like an amusing experiment in grid computing.
I have been running grid.org for many years. They focus on medical research. They provide great features for managing all your computers that run the grid projects. You can even choose which research to participate in. And, to satiate a geek's lust for power, they have rankings for your aggregate compute time.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
I'm sure there are lots of people who would support using thier idle PCs for alzheimers research. They just forgot.
Art is the mathematics of emotion
However they do it, whatever it takes. Drug companies weren't formed for altruistic reasons.
this sig deleted by another sig
Bah! Anyone running on a P4 is contributing to a global warming project.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Someone needs to set up a Yeti@HOME
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
That summary is more than a page and a half long on my screen (800x600), because the author doesn't know a thing about Slashdot and submitted a summary that looks more like a WSJ article.
Why can't the Story Accepters do a little editing on the side? It would have looked perfectly okay if you'd cut it off at "likely to yield results":
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes
It seems perfectly interesting and complete just like that. Why did we need the other two thirds?
Hint: That's what the link is for. You provide a good summary of the issue being talked about, and if we find it interesting, we click the link (or we head straight for the comments section and argue about it). You don't provide an entire page of stuff on the issue, because that's just not the format that we come to Slashdot for in terms of regular news stories. That only works for book reviews, editorials, and odd news stories that need the extra detail.
This, on the other hand, is an opinion piece on distributed computing. It's a very typical Slashdot article, and should have had a very typical Slashdot summary.
Okay, I'm not finding a cure for Alzheimer's, but at least I'm exploring the world of the Flying Spaghetti Monster with http://www.darwinathome.org.
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.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Inflation can only go through the roof if the government print lots of extra money. Money's a commodity like anything else, supply and demand.
Do you think inflation is something magic which only applies to money? Did you think money just magically decreases in value? It decreases in value because either nobody wants it (they don't believe it's worth anything) or because there's lots more of it around. e.g. The government prints a load of money to... say... finance a war, instead of raising taxes.
Funnily enough, the dollar has been falling in value rapidly against gold, it's nearly $600 per ounce now. In 2000 it was about $270 per ounce. Hmmm I wonder what is magically causing the dollar to decrease in value over the last few years.
If you live in the US, you have a boatload of inflation coming your way in the next few years.
Deleted
The only thing they ever claimed was "finding the WOW" - one signal in 1977 which could have been explained by a radio signal bouncing off a terrestrial satellite or some space junk.
As far as I know, there have been no other signals detected. SETI seems pretty pointless to me. Their whole basis for study is the "drake equation" which was an estimate, based on 1950's understanding of cosmology and evolutionary biology which estimated the likelihood of finding sentient life. What we know of cosmology has dramatically changed - even in the last few years as discoveries have invalidated long-held theses about planet formation.
It seems to me that the SETI project is a complete waste of time. You can use your computer for whatever you want. I prefer to make investments in scientific research rather than fanciful speculation. (Searching for Mersenne primes is demonstrable science, and will yield technical benefits as well increases in ordered knowledge.)
YMMV
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
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.
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
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Cool down some. Nobody is using force against you. There is simply an aruguement (partly rational and partly emotional) about what you can do with a resource that you have and that you can share at almost no cost to yourself. There is a competition between scientists for your free clock cycles. People have opinions about which ones are valuable, and they want to share their viewpoint and attempt to sway your opinion. That all that is happening here. If this causes to to curse him, I think you need a bit less coffee.
Think global, act loco
As you can see by their actions, rather than their words... Notably at Stanford University, Washington University, Munich University, Scripps Research Institute, Oxford University etc.
p
http://folding.stanford.edu/about.html
http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/rah_about.php
http://boinc.bio.wzw.tum.de/boincsimap/project.ph
http://predictor.scripps.edu/about_team.php
http://www.grid.org/projects/cancer/index.htm
So... Who are you again? Yeah, you're a guy reading Slashdot... Getting much research done?
Deleted
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.
As others have said, Bullshit with a capital "B".
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.
... 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.
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
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
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Pro's: 1 You are contributing to scientific research done mostly by universities, which, by definition, are independant / non profit, and do not have the funding for supercomputer hardware. 2 The scientific software is highly optimized for PC processors, with assembly routines and SSE(1,2,3) optimizations, so even though your PC is using maximum power at 100% CPU, it is on the other hand working as efficiently as possible. 3 The newest processor designs are not just faster, but also aim at consuming much less power, so running the projects on these is even more efficient. Con's: PC processors are too general purpose for some tasks, and floating point performance is somewhat weak in e.g. P4's. Specialized hardware provides increased computational performance and on the other hand decreased power consumption. Older PC's have inefficient processors which consume too much power. Just a few considerations ;)
well i think google should come here and join their paypal rivaling system of payments with some distributed computing software which would earn money for users running computations on their hardware for big bussiness companies paying. i would say that this would earn big bucks to everyone - and google will rule the world! its such a waste of money running computers at 0% cpu speed. i just hope for someone to send me some money for bringing this new idea to the world :)
As an American the only inconvenience I have found post 9/11 is having to put my shoes through an X-ray machine before I get on an airplane.
No offence, but its probably because you are White. My wife is Eqyptian. Before she has a chance to pull out her Canadian passport she's already been routed to the "special" security line. I get waived through without a second glance. Just because you are not the subject of invasive security practises does not mean they don't exist.
... a long time ago, at the exact moment when I recognized that radio broadcast, even assuming other life forms discover it, is just a quick stepping stone toward more efficient/direct means of distribution, like wires or fiber. Or drums. Or pherimones. Or telepathy.
It's happening right now for ourselves. The entire hi-power broadcast radio phenomenon on this planet will have begun and essentially ended within about a single lifetime, maybe two. We've no data to indicate that radio would remain a prefered means of communication anywere in the universe for any race that understands technology *that* well.
SETI has always barked up the wrong tree. Not because there are no intelligent races out there -- and I really do suspect there are -- but because if they *are* intelligent in a way that we would even recognize then they've moved on to other forms of communication, or settled into a fine state of just dealing with everyday as it comes and not worring about events in their version of Iraq.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
Radio SETI is really a waste of time. Optical SETI is the logical choice because;
1) Visible light-emitting devices are smaller and lighter than microwave or radio-emitting devices.
2) Visible light-emitting devices produce higher bandwidths and can consequently send information much faster.
3) Interference from natural sources of microwaves is more common than from visible sources.
4) Naturally occurring nanosecond pulses of light are mostly likely nonexistent, although there are all kinds of radio signals that could be similar to intentional SETI transmissions. Thus Optical SETI does not require grid computing to find signals.
5) Exact frequencies of light are not required, as nanosecond unfiltered light pulses would still outshine the planet's star by over 30 times.
Optical SETI detection out to 100 light-years is doable today, with a bit more work optical SETI out to 1,000 light-years is possible.
Optical SETI paper
One time my manager showed me some statistics for drug discovery. Drugs need to go through various rounds of testing: it might start with assays with just receptors, move up through animal tests to full blown clinical trials. He showed me two interesting facts: firstly, the correlation between success at one stage and success at the next stage was low. This meant that the correlation between the earliest stages and the final in vivo drug activity was tiny. Secondly, the best drugs were often outliers in the sense that you could often discern some kind of pattern allowing you to predict drug activity for a class of molecule, but that the good drugs fell way outside this pattern. Because activity levels predicted from simulation are so poorly correlated with the first stage of drug trials, and we already know that trials at this stage are poorly correlated with actual drug usefulness, simulations are just as much a waste of resources as SETI.
It seems to me that molecular modeling is actually one of those hard 'macho' (but ultimately pointless) projects that gets funding because to criticize it makes you seem anti-drug, anti-therapy and ant-human-progress.
(I'm not saying people shouldn't try to model molecules. This is a great blue-sky goal. But people who are trying to find drugs or therapies shouldn't be wasting their time with such techniques.)
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
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.
0 1 - just my two bits
Big fucking deal. My CPU cycles cost me money. In electricity, the upfront costs, etc. Yes, my money. Not my parents' money, not a government grant, and certainly not a tax write off along the lines that they can. Oh, I guess I can write it off. I just won't be getting as much money back or getting it nearly as quickly. Not to mention, I must subtantiate that I use it to generate a income, which isn't always easy.
Why bitch then? Because the WSJ is complaining that I give away my CPU cycles to bullshit causes. Well, they are mine and I did pay for them. And if the WSJ wants, the pharmas can pay me for what they consider worthwhile. Until then, if I want to use my car to go hang out with friends rather then serve as a personal chauffeur (for free, nonetheless!), guess what? I'm going to fucking use it to hang out.
Boycott Sony