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500-fold Increase in Data Flow from SETI Telescope
coondoggie brings us an article from Networkworld about a flood of new data for the SETI@home project. We discussed something similar a few months ago when a new telescope array went live. The vast amount of processing power required to handle the new data is prompting the SETI@home team to make a plea for more volunteers. Quoting the press release:
"What triggered the new flow of data was the addition of seven new receivers at Arecibo, which now let the telescope record radio signals from seven regions of the sky simultaneously instead of just one. With greater sensitivity and the ability to detect the polarization of the radio signals, plus 40 times more frequency coverage, Arecibo is set to survey the sky for new radio sources."
Sounds like a good time to re-install BOINC and start up SETI.
Protein Folding should take precedence over pointless searches for noise-in-patterns.
If they want more people then they should get rid of that silly bonic thing. I never liked it.
Although you're probably going to get marked troll you're right.
The cancer and other medical projects your can donate your processing power to are far more important then a fruitless search for aliens.
All my spare cycles are working on Yeti@Home
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
I thought they were going to shut down Arecibo or move to an array of smaller antenna's or something? Did the plan change or am I making this up?
Six hours nineteen minutes right ascension, fourteen degrees twenty-two minutes declination ... no sighting. ... no sighting. ... no sighting.
Six hours nineteen minutes right ascension, fourteen degrees twenty-three minutes declination
Six hours nineteen minutes right ascension, fourteen degrees twenty-three minutes declination
etc. ad infinitum
These folks have millions of compute nodes. And very little resources, which is why they set up this network in the first place. You really think they have time to go chasing after silly little bits of data that matter only to you? Next you'll be wondering why GW Bush never returns your calls.
i was kinda interested in this at one point then when I installed SETI@home i realized that it made my proc max out 24x7 and shoot up to it's load temps (obviously) and of course use more electricity. i decided that I wasn't willing to stress my equipment or pay for the electricity to run this type of software ( I do of course realize you can set the amount of cpu it uses.. but still) I think that all these distributed projects kinda try to gloss over the fact that it isn't free to participate ... and given the $100+ a barrel oil at the moment people that chose to participate should probably be made more aware of what the costs and wear and tear impacts really are.
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
I'm just curious how much energy the SETI project has used with zero results thus far. Is the amount of resources and time they are contributing to this cause really worth the incalculable chance they get a signal from an alien civilization? Having millions of PC's running at 100% doing pattern searching seems like a huge waste of energy. I'll run distributed clients myself like folding@home that actually have research results. Usually, only during the winter though (since electric heat is my only option anyway).
Just because you think you know what people should do, doesn't mean you do.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Arecibo? I thought they were closing it? At least they recently lost around 75% of their fundings.
There's a logic error here, I think. By this logic, we should do nothing except the very highest priority thing in our life, and society should pour all of its resources into the very most important priority. For example, we should all live in a thatched hut, eat weeds and grubs, wear the untanned raw skins of animals (or just go naked), and slave 18 hours a day so all our labor and energy can go into....whatever the single highest social priority is...curing cancer, fighting war 'n' injustice, whatever.
Which is silly. The goal of life is maximize overall satisfaction, not accomplish one single highest goal. It's important to rank your priorities, of course, both as an individual and as a society. But the notion that because A is "more important" than B implies ipso facto that A should get all the resources and B should get none is maximally silly.
Indeed, it's kind of OCD obsessive to always be focussed on pursuing the Top Goal, the kind of thing that when we see people doing it in practise -- giving up everything, including enough sleep and good nutrition, to, say, play World of Warcraft and become the biggest baddest player -- we conclude they need to do some growing up.
Fine, I'm burning cycles running a project that may (heck, when it comes to SETI, probably) won't see any tangible results.
But how is contributing to a project that was the basis for mainstreamed distributed computing any more wasteful than blowing 9 hours a night on WoW? I'd love to see a breakdown of the increased energy usage from a high-end CPU and a good video card vs. a PC that's on anyway and running BOINC when it's idle.
Screaming "carbon footprint!!" about something as trivial as BOINC is the real waste. Here, I've swapped 80% of the lights in my house for CFL's, and I burned 10 bucks worth of electricity last month (with an electric heater and 4x computers in the house no less!) does make me green enough to spare some processor cycles now?
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Did I say that people's spare CPU cycles should be mandated to SETI? As if that were feasible or even possible?
When I say that Protein Folding *should* take precedence over SETI, I'm simply making an appeal to people's personal priorities--and mine favor understanding and curing diseases over inconclusive alien signal-hunting every day of the week.
Yes, you're free to choose for yourself what cause you want to help out. As you should be. And I'm free to try to persuade others to help a very worthwhile cause:
http://folding.stanford.edu/"Oh, but it uses my precioussss energy!"
Of all the things in the world that monumental amounts of energy are 'wasted' on each day (powering bin Ladens dialysis machine,lighting the creationism museum,all the power used by all the dictators and oppressors of the world who shouldn't be allowed to LIVE let alone use resources), 'wasting' a few of them LOOKING FOR FUCKING EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE doesn't even come CLOSE to being classified as a 'waste'. FUCK! Am I at the wrong site?!!
Distributed programs like this aren't a waste of energy when you're trying to heat your home. Electric heat costs just as much when you get it from a computer as when you get it through a base-board. From a pure heating standpoint, useful computer calculations are pure byproduct. 200W of heat from a processor costs the same as 200W of heat from the heater. Funny how this should come out in the middle of winter (for most of the 'net connected population).
I guess it depends on what you really care about. Personally, knowing that there are intelligent beings out there would affect me a whole lot more than a cure for cancer. It changes the way I think about myself and my place in the universe. Think about all the crazy things that will happen with the world's religions. That alone would be worth it to me. Of course, right now, I don't have cancer nor anyone close to me. Like anything else, I reserve the right to change my mind.
I agree with you about Prime95 though.
My first thought was that some aliens discovered spam...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I almost never see anyone take note of what I deem to be the only to-date achievement of SETI -- defining a larger and larger region of space where it is known that there are no radio signals indicating intelligent life. Everyone seems to be focused on the expectation -- seemingly bordering on the religious -- that ET life will be found because it just HAS to be there.
I would note that there is no fundamental reason for this axiomatic proposition, and it makes much more sense simply go with the data rather than stubbornly cling to a belief for which there is so far not a shred of evidence -- much as the creationists do with regard to geology and archaelogy, I would note.
Maybe sometimes some evidence will appear for ET life. That will be interesting, if so. In the meantime, we have a rapidly growing contrarian body of evidence, so we should accept as our tentative conclusion that we are, in fact, the only life in the universe.
They started and demonstrated that distributed computing was a viable way to solve huge problems. SOmetimes basic research doesn't have an immediately applicable product - but sometimes the groundwork they lay provides for fruitful endeavors - e.g. Apollo program. No one thought electricity would be terribly important when it was first discovered, or the phone either. Give it a chance - maybe finding aliens might make us put aside our petty differences as countries.
..........FULL STOP.
I dont know, who wants to bet Seti finds an alien race with obviously advanced technology that will cure cancer faster than we can find the cure?
wow, really seems like 50/50 to me...
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Seti's current data explosion is just a small step, once the Paul Allen (Co Founder Microsoft) new array of telescopes and research centres comes online, the data requiring processing will go up by several magnitudes (dont know how they are going to solve that one, maybe ask Larry Page and Sergey Brin if they could "borrow" the spare clock cycles from all the googleplex data centres), unless Paul has also provided a few millions for their own setiplex.
We Live in Interesting times.
Darren Stephens
Adelaide, South Australia
I tried to install BOINC and could not find a way to hide the tray icon. It seems to be not running unless it displays the said icon. When I tried to install it as a service, I could not figure what username and password to supply so it doesn't fail to initialize the service (yup, I'm not a geek).
Come on, I want to install the client, configure the SETI task and settings ONCE, then forget about it completely and forever, let it run in background without reminding me of its existence, ever, period. I do NOT want my desktop cluttered by an extra tray icon. I've ditched it.
The old SETI screensaver did not display anything on the desktop while not running.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
It just occurs to me that SETI by using telescopes looking for radio data is a dead end because doesn't it assume that the alien will use some form of radio based technology for communication? However, if it's an intelligence we're interested in (ie. one capable of interstellar FTL travel), it probably would not use sub-light tech like radio. Radio might have been a transition tech for a phase of the civilization. So, we're assuming, in SETI, that we're looking into a period of time in that uses that transition tech. Isn't that even more unlikely to succeed than initially thought?
I hope that people realise that by covering 7 regions of the sky instead of one, and 40 times as much spectrum bandwidth as before, assuming that aliens are as likely to emit on any of these frequencies (which after all is not such a bad assumption considered we don't know a thing about them), statistically that will make us discover alien signals 280 times faster than before.
Very basically, that means that if we were say 1,000 years from finding an alien signal with the previous setup (which you can't say sounded so unlikely, I mean we barely listened for 40 years, and not always with the means we have now), we are now 3 years and a half away from that instead.
You just got troll'd!
This structural biologist offers the following insight. I looked
over the papers published by the FOLDING@Home guys and I didn't
see a lot of medically important results. Actually it looks like
the computational equivalent of naval gazing. I wonder why
the authors don't just get dirty and use crystallography
and/or NMR to solve their structural questions. I looked at their
recent paper trail, no (ok 1) Science/Nature papers...
I guarantee that if SETI@home finds a signal in the static the
authors will get the cover of science/nature (and a trip to Sweden).
Maybe beyond:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118884/
Save my job -- don't do FOLDING@Home
---537