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theSkyNet Wants Your Spare CPU Cycles
An anonymous reader writes "Thousands of PC users are being called on to donate their spare CPU cycles to help create a massive grid computing engine to process terabytes of radio astronomy data as part of theSkyNet project. It will be used for, among other things, processing the huge amount of data expected to flow off Australia's forthcoming Square Kilometre Array telescope."
One can only assume that "other things" will include achieving sentience and finding John Connor.
Oh, wait...
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
And who was to think that the apocalypse would come from the Australian Outback?
For the love of everything, can we stop making shitty references to Terminator in computational intelligence stories? There are actually people stupid enough to believe that shit. Also, its not funny.
SETI searches for ET.
This would process radio telescope data to create images from radio waves.
Different goals, different organizations.
As if my spare cycles are free!. Why should I let my electricy bill increase for some hopeless search
The quality of Slashdot articles and what they cover is really going down hill. The only reason this article got here must have been because the SKA uses the name "TheSkyNet project". Short response, WE DON'T CARE! We've had SETI since 1999. Not to mention that there's more "important" stuff to spend the computing power on such as Folding@Home.
What could possibly go wrong?
SKA - The SKA will give astronomers insight into the formation and evolution of the first stars and galaxies after the Big Bang, the role of cosmic magnetism, the nature of gravity, and possibly life beyond Earth.
SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is an exploratory science that seeks evidence of life in the universe by looking for some signature of its technology.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
What TFS neglects to mention is what the download requirement is on the PC. People tell me I have a ridiculous download limit when I talk about having 200GB per month - yet, the SKA is going to be generating exabytes of data.
How can you meaningfully process the data generated by the SKA without imposing on people's downloads? How do they address this with SETI?
Might as well get it over with by making the Obvious Reference in the article.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Well, at least theSkyNet will see that I was the first to welcome, I mean bow before, it. Did I just type that out loud?
In the distance you hear an ominous moo.
This is better as you have a really good chance of your computer will contribute a tiny amount to the project and to astronomy in general.
As opposed to SETI where you are most likely processing meaningless noise or using incorrect metrics.
I was just about to ask radio telescope users to donate their spare telescope time to help generate massive amount of data to process on my square kilometer server farm.
Skynet will kill us.
Unless there's some licensing or technical issue, why not use the already-established distributed computing framework BOINC? That would make much more sense than having a user always running a Java applet in a browser window that can be closed and forgotten.
Zooniverse seems much more distributed human analysis, kind of a Mechanical Turk. Why not BOINC, which already exists as a distributed computing source? Being on BOINC gives them access to tens of thousands of computers.
I know its probably going to be brought up a lot.. but really, why name your project after a computer in a movie that becomes sentient and tries to wipe out humanity? Could have been.. StarNet, or SkyFisher... or anything. Its as if they wanted all the internet nerds to make fun of them.
I'm happy about it. I only really use SETI@Home because I want to contribute to astronomy with my CPU cycles, and it's the best of the bunch (I found Einstein@Home a little flaky in terms of work unit updates, and for some reason never saw the appeal of MilkyWay@Home). If my cycles could do something more useful for SKA, I'd definitely consider moving over.
Yes, but how is it different LATELY?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dddAi8FF3F4
Remove all youtube videos that contain any of the following:
-rick
-a cat
-a black person talking about rapists
-a crossdresser
-lipdubs with fat chicks wearing clothes that are too tight or too sexy for them
-hot chicks talking about their emotions/hope/career/fashion tips, thinking that because they have a lot of subscribers people care about what they say, while actually most subscribers are just sick old pervs doing the ol' nasty while watching these videos in their basement
Then use all the processing power suddenly available on youtube servers, and give us a break with screensaver processing a la seti.
thinking of that, scratch the whole list above and just remove videos with hot chicks that have a lot of subscribers but that are seldomly watched completely because viewers are "done" before the hot chick... and there you go, plenty of cpu available, and probably a few more bucks will find their way to those single moms working the pole to pay their student loan.
lucm, indeed.
As opposed to SETI where you are most likely processing meaningless noise or using incorrect metrics.
And when you're not, you're contributing to one of the most significant discoveries since fire.
For one of them, it's actually quite likely that they'll find something interesting.
With modern CPU's generally slowing down to save power and reduce heat output, are spare CPU cycles really spare?
I defiantly know - fans speed up when CPU is busy, does this grid type of software take this into account and use only really idle cycles or does it keep the CPU powered up when there is no user doing anything 'important'?
They need all those extra cycles to screen out porn and violent video games from interstellar communications.
Saying that the SKA belongs to Australia is misleading - the decision on whether it will be built in Australia or South Africa will only be made in 2012.
...when we can always design robots to look like cheerleaders or high school sweethearts?
That way, when they DO take over mankind, we wouldn't mind so much.
One is a scientific project, the other is looking to find Alf
One is a scientific project, the other is looking to find Alf
No, they are looking for E.T., otherwise they would be named SAlfI@Home! :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
they should been more sublte about name chose since we all know how it ended...
or do they expect that we will find it funny, wave hand and say, haha funny name.
not
Is hasn't been decided where it will be yet -- it could well be in South Africa.
Two different projects doing the same thing, I think. SETI is a search for alien signals with the Arecibo telescope, and SkyNet is a search for alien signals with the SKA telescope.
I'd happily donate my CPU cycles to them. I have 4 cores here sitting doing mostly nothing, and I fully agree it is for the most part completely wasted silicon for the 23 hours a day I don't play games.
But I will have to send them my power bill. While my processor cycles are free, the energy usage is not. The difference between a computer sitting idly all year and running full pelt on the processor can easily be $100+ from a back of the envelope calculation, the GPU can also amount to the same.
How said.
A science project without a Linux 32/64 bit client? Does SkyNet expect me to run a virtual windows system to run their project in the 'background'. What a waste of CPU cycles.
Still Seti@Home I suppose.
Having just read TFA, I find that I missed something important. SETI is just about looking for alien signals. This is about looking for anything interesting, whether it's extraterrestrial intelligence or not.
Looks like some people are jumping the gun a bit...
Typical, like when the Aussie's volunteered to host the World Cup Soccer because they 'knew' that South Africa was not up to it.
They really picked the perfect name.
Drop the "The." Just "SkyNet." It's cleaner.
It read a Gartner report and outsourced itself to another galaxy.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
a less likely null hypothesis
Aaaand once again it just happens that the machines that would be more than suitable for background processing, are completely left out of the loop. Should I attempt to run the client on lynx or curl?
Way to waste at least 20% of the CPU power, lazy programmers. I'll take my CPUs to something that actually uses them efficiently like Folding@home which is optimised as opposed to interpreted or even compiled java bytecode being pushed like molasis through a straw.
Yes, but how is it different LATELY?
SETI is already running for some time. SKA is still the "under construction" stage.
Is this enough for a specific difference?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Java is often used for scientific computing because of its performance—not in spite of it. Modern REs can even out-perform natively compiled code thanks to runtime optimizations. You probably think Java is slow because of one lousy UI toolkit (called Swing), which hardly anyone uses. In other words, find another trope.
...are buried deep on the website for some weird reason. They are available for Windows and "Macintosh". No generic *nix version so far, which struck me as something pretty bad given the common demography generally interested in helping out with this sort of project.
Oh, was I the only one thinking it? Sorry.
... mining BitCoins you insensitive clod.
I remember SETI always having issues with work units. There weren't enough so a bunch of users got the same work units. Found that to be a turn-off...didn't have that cozy feeling of actually contributing anything, as with other projects. Has that been worked out?
Also, did not SETI also want to make use of the australia array? What's the status of that (haven't been following it)?
...why are the antennas of the telescope beamed upwards ?!?
> And when you're not, you're contributing to one of the most
> significant discoveries since fire.
All romance aside...purely from the distances involved (assuming a radio signal indicating 'intelligent life'), it would certainly be a very exciting discovery (for a while), but not necessarily 'most significant'.
Until we get there (or they here)...even just by radio contact, nevermind physical, we got nothing out of it other than knowing, we're not the only guys around. And that's already a given anyway.
Java is often used for scientific computing because of its performance, not in spite of it. Modern JVMs may even execute programs faster than if they were compiled natively. You people need to find another trope.
Yes I am starting a project where any male can find women who are amenable to hooking up on a moments notice. All you have to do is sign up at pussy.looking,com and you will get a list of available horny women who are willing to do unspeakable sex acts.
Sign up for my next project where our member will be selected to be probed by Aliens or women with strap-ons. You get to choose.
Until we get there (or they here)...even just by radio contact, nevermind physical, we got nothing out of it other than knowing
Hence, why I called it a discovery. One could have said the same thing about fire. It, after all, has been around every since there was a high concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere and woody plants on the land. That's several hundred million years at least. The human innovation was learning how to use it.
Similarly, SETI isn't just about discovering that we're not alone, but also how to use that. If you can detect an alien civilization, then the possibility exists of not only being able to communicate with them, but also trade knowledge.
is this an extension of the SETI project, or are they just using the same methodology for the project?
I managed to get into Test4Theory before it got overwhelmed a few weeks ago and I'm happily cruching data for Cern. Sorry, SkyNet.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Using your "spare CPU cycles" makes the CPU use more power, it is by no means free.
This is true for other things, like ads using flash animations for example. I always find it ironic to see it in sites like TreeHugger, which is full of flashy animations. I would expect a green site to use mostly static HTML and text based ads to reduce the carbon footprint of all it's viewers.
I wonder if anyone's considered donating CPU time to a project like Folding@Home or this, and then writing off the electricity costs on their taxes?
"Silently look for the off switch!"
Yeah, people keep bitching about that first weekend where a software glitch caused the same work to be sent for the first weekend we were in operation. As someone close to the SETI@home team, please stop bitching about a bug that's been fixed for 11 goddamn years!
BTW, we'd love to make use of the SKA, but it doesn't exists yet.
Support SETI@home
Yeah, SETI@home found 114 sources of pulsed emission, possibly a new form of pulsar. But you don't wanna hear about that. You want to hear about the what the telescope that doesn't exist yet might find.
Support SETI@home
Nereus? Why would they use Nereus? Someone on the board own stock?
Support SETI@home
Go investigate the relative performance yourself.
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/
You are wrong. These comparisons are apples to apples, not “proper” versus “improper” code. I found that link from The Java is Faster than C++ and C++ Sucks Unbiased Benchmark, which satirically demonstrates how people may arrive at flawed perceptions about performance.
Generally speaking, experience teaches engineers that languages are not slow. Algorithms and execution environments are slow. Bad code with good compilers can be fast. Good code with bad compilers can be slow. However, languages do affect developer performance.
In the simplest sense, your belief that any language is slow relative to another is easily refuted. Consider two programs written in language X and Y respectively. Both programs produce identical output for identical input. Suppose we then introduce machine translation that compiles X into Y (or vice versa) before compilation. Or, alternatively, our respective compilers for X and Y produce identical output.
See what I did there?
In the US, if the organization is an NPO and you can get them to keep track of your donation and send both you and the IRS a copy stating how much you donated, yes. This probably won't happen, though, as it really isn't worth it for either them or you (even in the highest tax bracket, 35%, that'd be at most, what, 60 USD?). I think it'd cost them more to track all of the users, their locations, the local electricity rates, and hire the extra accountants to keep track of it all. Unless, I suppose, you've got a large Beowulf cluster going and a dedicated aircon system running to keep it cool.
The original post is incorrect.
theSkyNet is working on HIPASS data initially, as a precursor to working on data from the CSIRO Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder when it comes online.
As numerous people have pointed out the site selection for the SKA won't be announced until next year
> Yeah, people keep bitching about that first weekend where a
> software glitch caused the same work to be sent for the first
> weekend we were in operation.
Nobody was bitching, so chill, bro! I was not aware, that this was merely a bug. My impression from back then (it's been a while) was, that there was simply not enough data from Arecibo available due to other work being done with the radioscope (is that the correct term?). If that is not an issue anymore, then great!
> If you can detect an alien civilization, then the possibility exists of
> not only being able to communicate with them, but also trade
> knowledge.
I'm completely with you on that. But it's simply gonna take a while. It's simply unlikely, that the first contact will be "Contact"-style ("Jackpot!"), where we get all kinds of wonderful things sent to us right away. Chances are, we detect something at some point, and then it will take a few decades of back and forth communication, if we even have a language we can agree on and understand each other. It might even turn out, that we are the advanced guys. In that case what are we gonna do? Send 'em a ZIP'ed copy of Wikipedia? :-)