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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."
Protein Folding should take precedence over pointless searches for noise-in-patterns.
All my spare cycles are working on Yeti@Home
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
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
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.
Me too. Last time I used it the Linux install involved way too many steps. It is packaged as a 'generic' Linux binary, and left up to the individual to tweak it to fit their particular system. I am quite happy to contribute spare cpu cycles to the project, but at the moment I don't have the spare sys-admin cycles required to setup, configure and babysit the software.
If they want more people to install it, they need to do something like create a RPM installer and setup a yum repository. If the installation was as simple as 'yum install bonic' plus a simple Python configure script to set the project URL, then ReadHat could/would probably add it to Fedora. Which would mean that 1000's of people would see it listed in the install options, and some of them would probably give it a go.
The other reason I left was the change in the way that stat were reported. When I started, their website showed a headline figure of number of CPU years in the last 24hrs. To me, seeing that figure increase as the project gained more users was a real incentive to add machines and contribute more to the project. It gave you the warm fuzzy feeling that we were all contributing to what was at the time one of the largest computing projects in the world.
Now everything is listed as teams competing for 'credits', whatever they are. I didn't join to earn 'credits', I joined to participate in one of the largest collaborative computing projects in the world.
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.
gnarayan@munin|~> apt-cache search boinc
boinc-app-seti - SETI@home application for the BOINC client
boinc-client - core client for the BOINC distributed computing infrastructure
boinc-dev - development files to build applications for BOINC projects
boinc-manager - GUI to control and monitor the BOINC core client
kboincspy - monitoring utility for the BOINC client
kboincspy-dev - development files for KBoincSpy plugins
There are plenty of tools to convert debs to rpms The other reason I left was the change in the way that stat were reported. When I started, their website showed a headline figure of number of CPU years in the last 24hrs. To me, seeing that figure increase as the project gained more users was a real incentive to add machines and contribute more to the project. It gave you the warm fuzzy feeling that we were all contributing to what was at the time one of the largest computing projects in the world. You can still see this - login to your account (from boincmgr) and it shows you that - if anything today you get more stats - I know how many total users there are - it still is very much one of the largest computing projects in the world. I also know what the highest position I stood in the world is (if only that was my slashdot UID), where relative to my team, where relative to my country, how much credit I got from each work unit, how much credit I got on a day to day basis...
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
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/My first thought was that some aliens discovered spam...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!