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SETI Distributed Searching
Everyone, their brother, mother and dog wrote to point us over to SETI@Home v1.0. Taking a note from the distributed playback, they are giving clients to use the spare cycles on your machine - check out more information, if you like.
Where's the source?
I don't know... it's good to be paranoid. Why won't they just release the source?
Isn't @home a registered trade mark? I would think using the name, even in the subcontext of SETI, seems like it could cause legal problems.
So we find an alien race several million light years away -- then what? Watch their TV shows?
Even if they haven't gone extinct by the time the physicists have pulled their
heads from their posterior and we (might) have technology to communicate with them,
your desktop PC will be able to analyse all the data SETI@home did in under
an hour. Distributed's Golumb ruler project sounds to be of more merit. No I guess
it doesn't come with a screensaver. I guess that will be the deciding factor. Sigh.
Use some terrestrial intelligence and run Linux or BSD..
spare cycles claim is not bogus. It's just your operating system that's bogus.
Check out setiherder (http://www.sackheads.org/setiherder/). It's a gtk front end for multiple seti clients, even on different machines via ssh. To take use of smp install seti in a different directory for each processor.
As for dial-on-demand, the newer pppd has an option for this. In my opinion, much easier than diald. Check out http://www.nic.com/~cannon/Linux/index.htm for a nice step by step on this and ipmasq.
Runs fine on my FreeBSD 3.1R box... no noticeable impact on performance at all.
PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU CPU COMMAND
10247 jman 92 1 14900K 14520K RUN 35:47 93.26% 93.26% setiathome
Thanks! I was wondering about that also. Hopefully, they will take a look at distributed.net for a better model of organization.
We're already capable of detecting the equivalent of our own radio
transmissions across the galaxy (more or less), and since radio is
cheap and easy, it starts to look like we can detect anything in the
galaxy that wants to be detected, and probably will within our
lifetimes, if they're out there.
I doubt this is true. Isn't the propogation of electromagnetic radiation determined by some inverse square law?
I think the block size is just right. I just wish they would let me have more than 1 block at a time.
Hi,
The berkeley servers are all bogged down. Can someone with the win32 version setup a mirror.
Use a statically linked binary.
There are several very nice distributed projects on the net
OGR, GIMPS, PIHEX, etc. Colin Percival's PIHEX is pretty cool. Unfortunately, he doesn't have his stuff ported to Linux yet. However, he DOES provide MSC and ASM source code.
please do.
All you need to do is fire up regedit go to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Run key, and prefix this onto your seticlient string: "start /low"
SETI is dumb. It is based on the belief that alien civilizations are using radio wave technology. But what is the lifetime of any technology: 100 years? 200 years tops? The chances of an alien cilization existing AND within radio listening range AND within 100 years of our technological age are very, very slim.
It is rather like ancient bushmen hoping to contact us by setting up a large network to listen for distant drums when here we are communicating on cell phones.
Er, the government stopped funding SETI years ago, it's done by volunteers and donations completely now.
Profanity, off-topic, spiteful?
or vanity. Does this make linux look bad because there are more windows work-units completed vs linux? (23-0)
ever heard of LOWpriority????????
When you read a website, YOU HAVE SPARE CYCLES
what if aliens dont use radio waves?
We're demonstrating not only that 128 is greater than 64, but that 64 is now a little low to take seriously. (1024 is a common prime-number key size, which is really measured on a different scale.)
Could you email me the source? My address
is setirulez@hotmail.com Thanks alot!
You are assuming all the asteroids/comets (whatever) are in periodic orbits and we'll have time to detect them through a program like this (good idea though). :)
However, it's probably more likely the one that gets us will be the one we don't see until the day/week/month before it hits. (asteriods in general are VERY hard to detect) I do agree that this would be a useful effort, but given current technology we may not detect the "one" before we can stop it anyways.
So, searching for earth-crossing asteriods IS probably as useful as helping SETI.. (and it was this or keep doing the RC5 cracking, as you say, this is probably just as *useful*, but more interesting IMHO)
Go search for the papaer "trusting the trust", its on the jargon file under backdoor.
Basicly you can't even trust programs that is compiled. Why? Because how do you know the compiler is worth trusting?
And to recompile the compiler, you'll NEED TO COMPILE IT.
Per their website, I think the "official" release date is Monday, May 17. (I haven't received any emails either.)
And, most importantly, we would finally see how Elvis looks like, after his Vegas years.
If you open taskman under NT, you can see why this thing is such a cpu hog. Set it to show kernel time. I'd guess that all the pretty graphics are silly directX calls eating that massive kernel time that doesn't want to be pre-empted... Am I right?
--> sorry for the anon: glim@sunsmoke.org (greg)
To startup seti in background
/dev/null &
/etc/rc.d/init.d/seti with this and add it to the runlevels where you want this started. Check out the existing files for examples.
./setiathome -nice 19 &>
Create a script like
I've got all these 4 and 8 gig RAM machines around here at work that don't even notice...
Yeah, if you've only got 16 or 32 megs, you'll probably throw your machine into perpetual swap and your performance will degrade badly.
There are a lot of issues with it. Even with the most secure protocol in existance, you are still getting the client to do work for you. You need to have some level of trust in that work, or it's pointless. No matter what checking methods you use, without completely duplicating the work you cannot be 100% sure that the results are 100% accurate. I'm sure it's quite obvious there are a lot of attention starved people out there that would have no qualms about upsetting the research if it made them feel special (Just look at how many web servers get hacked just to slap up a page like 'free mitnick' (sp)) It may be obvious when a disruption occurs, but who wants to clean it up? Don't forget that altered data can work both ways.. in the situation with RC5 one could merely mark blocks as "done and not found" and then process those blocks at their leisure to get the reward. Or a small modification could cause a valid key to not be sent, and instead that person claims the prize. Except in this case you're dealing with people that have dedicated a large chunk of their lives to "chasing little green men" - sacrificing a good deal in the progress. I have no doubt that there are people out there that wouldn't think twice about masking a valid discovery, and then suddenly claiming it for themselves. Of course.. they'd have to know what they were looking for, how to modify the client, etc. This is a case where your .1% performance boost is not worth the hazard it introduces.
Anyone else read Excession by Iain Banks? I believe the following is appropriate.
Though, I agree if there were something searching for near earth objects, I'd run that in favor of SETI.
Hello,
the binaries are build by volunteers for their
respective platforms and you see a glibc2.1
binary because that is what the volunteer
in question (me) happens to have on his machine.
If you wait a little bit the other developers
will get around and produce the other Linux versions as well, including the glibc2 == glibc2.0.x version.
Steffen
I have submitted a gnulib1 and a gnulibc1-static
version yesterday. Someone else will make
tar-files from them make them available.
Steffen
"Some memory". Yeah, that's one way to put it. Last version I tested used in the neighborhood of 20M. That's why I'm still running RC5. I've got plenty of spare cycles, but I don't have 20M of spare RAM.
If Hogan's Heros was on the air from, say, 1966-1970, then the first episodes are 33 light years out.
You do the math.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Now the government can say "You have all the computing power you need with all those volunteers, why should we give you any more money?" This might be bad for SETI in the long run.
Similarly, the Mac client is at
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/software/setiat home_mac_1_0.sit
Posted by AnnoyingMouseCoward:
Sorry, but the size of the milky way galaxy is 100 thousand light years on it's major axis, not 100 million ( ya gotta watch the order of magnitude dude...).
Posted by AnnoyingMouseCoward:
Look, I'm sorry to get nasty about this, but what rock have you been living under for the last five years?
There are currently several projects in the pipe that will accomplish this, including the interferometer currently under construction down in Chile and NASA's proposed "Deep Space III" interferometer that's scheduled for launch around 2002.
Like I said, I don't want to be nasty about this, but why is it that the people at SETI keep acting as if they have a monopoly on the subject? Are you guys taking lessons from Bill Gates on "how to win friends and influence people?".
Astronomical observations are of importance to the entire scientific community. The subject of habital planets and the possible occurence of life (including intelligent life) elsewhere within the universe is of interest to the entire scientific community.
Normally, I don't have a problem with SETI, since it's now privately funded, but I really wish that you lot would stop acting as if the issues involved were your personal playground.
Posted by AnnoyingMouseCoward:
Ah yes, that old shaggy dog story.
The main problem with the Drake Equation isn't even that it's pure guesswork in terms of estimating the various factors.
The real problem with the Drake equation is that it's more a statement of the pre-conceptions and obsessions of the 1950's than actual science.
For example, consider the term Ll, the expected lifetime of a tecnologically advanced species. This seemed like an important factor during the height of the cold war, but today it's starting to look more and more irrelevent.
Likewise the factors Ee, the number of habitable planets around each main sequence star of the right spectral type and size. Irrelevent. Any species that develops interstellar space flight will alter this variable by re-engineering any suitable planets that they find into life supporting worlds.
The same argument also applies to many of the other terms in the *damned* Drake equation, such as the likelyhood of sentience evolving on a living planet. This is where David Brin rocked the boat a few years back with his "Uplift Series", which is based on the idea of a galactic society that artificially modifies species to intelligence.
In short, the Drake Equation is only valid for galaxies with intelligent life at infinte dilution ( ie, N ~ 1 ). Once intelligent life forms start re-engineering planets ( or stars for that matter ), it ceases to have *any* *relevence* *whatsoever*.
Not that any of these arguments seem to have much impact over at SETI. The Drake Equation has become a matter of "religious orthodoxy" amongst them, and any critisism of it is viewed as nothing short of hearesy.
Just my two inquisitors worth.
Posted by AnnoyingMouseCoward:
You stated
>I'll stay away from the Christians, cuz I don't >wanna rain on their parade.
Yeah, but SETI claims to be *science*, not *religious faith*.
Now excuss me moron, but as I understand it, debate and critisism is supposed to be part of the process whereby which science refines a concept to either establish it's validity or to dump it in the pile with other things that have been shown to be false.
Why not just stop pretending. For people like you, SETI is *religion*. If you want to cross out "God" and write "ET" in it's place, go ahead, but don't claim that it's science unless your prepared to engage in some serious debate on the subject instead of spewing profanity at anyone who disagrees with you.
If that's your opinion, then my advice is - stick with "God" and give "ET" a miss.
Posted by AnnoyingMouseCoward:
/., the usual response to your questions were along the line of "hey, don't worry dude, there are plenty of spare cycles out there. We can do SETI and look for space junk...".
The last time this came up here at
At this point in time, that's true enough.
However, according to some of the blurbs in New Scientist magazine's "In Brief" column over the last year, there are a number of commercial companies out there who are starting to look at this technology ( largely because of all the publicity around the SETI project ).
The idea that you can have the equivelent processing power of several thousand super-computers via the internet is something that the corporate players are already looking at making money from.
Nett result - all of those spare cycles will soon be rented out to the highest bidder. At which point, you can say goodbye to the whole idea of distibuted internet processing for any public project. It will all be commercial and strictly buisness as usual.
As for your comments on "1km objects", nope, they dont' have to be anywhere near that size.
One of the theories that's currently gaining ground is that the Tunguska event was actually caused by a 40m diameter meteorite that super-heated and explosively vaporised [ ok, this still hasn't been proven, but it's what the latest bunch of simulations are indicating ].
In addition to this, some of the most recent work ( in was in an issue of Scientific America about six months back ) is starting to indicate that we will probably get Tunguska type events about once a centuary [ ie, 2,000 square kilometers flatened ].
As human population levels continue to rise, there are fewer and fewer places on the surface of the Earth where something like this can happen without wholesale loss of human life.
I'd like to think that we will be mature enough to wake up to the nature of the problem before much more time goes by, but my inate cynisism tells me that we will probably have to wait for a major city like New York or London or Tokyo to get wiped out before anyone starts paying attention.
As for running to NASA for help, not neccessarily. There are a lot more people out there who are concerned about the problem than you might think. SETI might get most of the media coverage [ because it's regarded as more newsworthy than a 40m diameter meteor ], but there are plenty of us out there.
I make reasonably good money as a programmer. If there was some kind of public group out there that was trying to get going, then I for one would join it [ and for that matter, put my money where my mouth is on the subject ]. Ditto for any distributed projects doing image processing to hunt for Earth orbit crossing meteorites. If anyone can give a URL it would be appreciated.
Just my 40m of space wandering debris gang.
Posted by AnnoyingMouseCoward:
...since they are the ones with the loudest voices. Overall though, I don't see much of a difference between any of them.
Maybe I'm wrong to paint them all with the same brush, but so far my experience with people who are into SETI hasn't been very productive. Whenever the subject comes up, I can't help but get the impression that I'm talking to a bunch of Mormons or Jehova's Witnesse's.
Admitedly, I have met some people who are into SETI who don't fit this mold, but they have tended to be in the minority. On that basis alone, I really don't hold out much hope that SETI projects are going to do anything except make a laughing stock out of anyone associated with it ( and by implication, anyone involved in Astronomy in general ).
As a side-note to the data integrity argument, but having not looked at the source code (ha!), I'm convinced anyone with tcpdump and a little persistence could surely just work out the protocol between the client and server and feed these guys whatever malicious data he wanted to.
Oh well, they won't get my CPU cycles. And I was looking forward to using them on something at least remotely useful (unlike breaking DES over and over to prove that, yes, 56 really is a smaller number than 1024).
yeah i could maybe get the app on floppy or disc, considering SETI is right across the hall from me ;)
"There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
Run it with "-nice 19" and yes, it will take your load average up to 1.0. However, it will also get out of the way and not interfere with your work. I've found that large compiles are only slightly slower (like less than 1%).
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
I launched it in application mode (constantly doing processing) and noticed that it does *not* automatically lower its priority. It runs right alongside other apps and will degrade your system's processing ability.
To fix this under NT, open the Task Manager (ctrl-alt-del), click the Processes tab, right-click on the "SETI@Home.exe" entry and select Low priority.
Once I did that it things started working as I'd expected them to.
You're probably looking at the application window, not the screen saver. It can be run in either of these two modes. Perhaps you should read the documentation that came with it before posting stuff like this to Slashdot?
Try waiting until your screensaver comes on, or open your screen saver settings and click on Preview. It is indeed a "screen saver" (in the modern sense) and even asks me for my password.
Firstly, the government isn't involved, even indirectly. This is all donation-funded volunteer work. SETI doesn't get crap from the government.
Secondly, you shouldn't automatically distrust all closed-source software simply because most people can't really tell you for certain what it does. You should distrust software you get from untrustworthy people, sure. If you go through this whole procedure of locking down the program using setroot/restricted shell/etc for EVERY closed-source app you run, well, I just feel sorry for you.
That's a whole lotta work for a practically non-existent risk. I've never had a virus on my Windows computers and I've never accidentally run any silly trojans under Unix. Nobody I know has either, and I run closed-source, proprietary apps quite frequently (under both OS's).
There IS a point where founded caution becomes silly paranoia, and in my opinion, this crosses it.
With source code, the packet kiddies will find some way to crash the servers or forge "I found it!" messages and generally cause mischief, much like what happened with Distributed.net and (esp.) it's ancestor at GenX.net.
It's pretty sad that people deliberately find ways to *prevent* progress like this, but it happens.
I just wonder what sort of continuous data stream we'd send them over the course of 50 years... (and vice-versa).
I can just picture their transmission after we've been sending them stuff for 50 years sounding like, "Look, we KNOW ENGLISH already, and can't you send anything faster than that? Great, I guess we have 50 years of this to look forward to."
Start it up using setiathome > /dev/null. That will send all the program output (not including error messages) to limbo.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Forget it, must have just been slashdotted...
Trying a fourth or fifth time managed to connect and get data through the firewall.
Thanks to anyone who decided to try looking this up anyway!
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
Does anybody know what ports/methods the software communicates on? I have a packet filtering firewall and no SOCKS proxy, so I'll have to configure the firewall to pass whatever the software needs, but I don't feel like breaking out a packet sniffer to try and take educated guesses...
:-)
The software claims not to get a connection when I attempt to "create an account" so I assume my problem is my firewall, rather than the SETI@home's servers... although with the slashdot announcement, that may not be a valid assumption
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
Neat article in Discover Magazine about this either this month or last. It's online but I don't have an exact URL. Try to find it at http://www.discover.com Tres' cool.
- Rev. Randy
- Kate
"DNA is life. The rest is just translation."
No problems on two linux boxes here. I run it with this command line ./setiathome -nice 19
It does take a sizable chunk of memory though.
RSS=13196 %CPU=97.2 %MEM=20.8
which compares to netscape:
RSS=13924 %CPU=0.0 %MEM=22.0
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
The web site talks about how they're encoding the data to ensure that it's not false. Does anyone have any idea how any of this is being done? I'm not a cracker or anything, I'm just curious as to whether they're using known algorithms or came up with something new.
Wouldn't it be interesting if they used the pattern itself to encrypt the data? Sure would make life simple, and although if someone discovered that, I suppose the code would be broken.
While it seems that it is not "officially" SETI it obviously has their approval.
Well, obviously if any of the terms of the Drake equation are unknown (random), then the result is unknown/random. The math isn't invalidated, though.. if you could somehow accurately quantify the terms, then multiplying the terms together would give you the right answer.
The Drake equation is intended to document the factors involved in figuring out how many radio civilizations might possibly be out there, which it does reasonably well. Actual numbers that anyone gives you for that number are indeed just guesses, although possibly bounded by at least plausible constraints on at least some of the terms.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Hm, I'd imagine everyone would pretty implicitly understand that the Drake equation has no scientific validity.. it's just a way of laying out various significant factors in the question of 'what are our odds?'.
I'd love to see a better one, but I'm guessing that to do any better would require a lot more data than we have.. like if we could somehow tap into the galactic Usenet a la 'A Fire Upon The Deep'.
.- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Correction: that would be on the order of 2,500 years at the current keyburn rate for rc5-72. No thanks.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
How will they know we're here in order to illuminate our solar system in particular? Oh, I know, they'll have been running their own SETI program for a few million years...
I was raised on too much science fiction (albeit the good stuff.. Heinlein, Clarke..), but it seems to me that having a low-level on-going SETI program should just be one of the things an advanced civilization does to while away the eons.
No time like the present to get started.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Oh, one more thing.. SETI@Home is searching a specific band of frequences around 1.4 GHz because that's an unusually quiet region of radio frequency due to various physical properties of the galaxy, etc. SETI@Home is listening for what would be a deliberately placed radio signal.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Um. Have you read the background materials at http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu at all? The SETI@Home project is being carried out by a team at the same university that is doing the Serendip IV project, which is the main SETI project previously underway. They are funded, they have published (very interesting) technical details about their methodology, and they are every bit as much a 'part of' SETI as is anyone else.
Are you upset because Jodie Foster didn't use SETI@Home on her personal computer in Contact or something? Who do you imagine decides who is 'affiliated with' SETI?
According to the published papers on their site, SETI@Home will examine as many possible signals as the Serendip IV project. Yes, SETI@Home will process a smaller frequency range, but it will examine it in much greater detail, which much more expensive computational analysis thanks to your computer and mine.
Incidentally, I'd recommend taking a look at the scientific papers linked to the SETI@Home site.. what they are doing to perform reasonable data analysis on signals picked up by their piggy-back receivers while the Areceibo telescope is in use and even in motion for other projects doing direct observation for traditional radio astronomy is fascinating. No wonder it took them so much longer to get the SETI@Home client out than it took the distributed.net people to get their network running.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
If you're running an old client, you might not be doing as much as you think. The earlier versions didn't run as thorough a check, and the newer ones do ten or more times as much work. That's mentioned on the SETI Web page. On the other hand...
I'm sort of wondering if the Mac client (at least) has some optimization problems, or a conflict with some extension or other. I'm running it on a G3/233, and it's taking *forever* to finish a chunk (as much as 40 hours). Maybe it's something to do with my setup, but I'm not getting any responses from the Project SETI team about it.
There is already a large group of people doing a search for Earth-crossing asteroids. They're called "amateur astronomers."
It would taks a *much* larger investment in time and equipment to get an automated optical search going, involving hundreds of small telescopes and image capturing devices. The Arecibo telescope project happened only because the equipment was basically already in place, and the data only needs interpretation.
As a comparison, SETI@Home only needs a few gigs of information passed through a server, along with the "free" client time, versus the millions of dollars worth of CCDs and telescopes that you would need for an ongoing optical search (SETI@Home is only going to run for two years, versus the "never can stop" optical asteroid search).
I was able to download the client for my Linux workstation
at home, but all the windows ftp sites are currently
spammed (/.ed?) I'd liek to run it on my NT PC at
work, anyone have a mirror?
Is anyone working on a SETI screensaver for Unix? JWZ mentioned (search for 'jwz') a module for xscreensaver, but nothing showed up in the latest release. I think his best idea was a sphere with the constellations traced on it. You could also put an xload like display on the bottom of the screen showing the strength of the signals found. That would be a lot more fun than a background process pumping out numbers.
They have several postings on their website (in the FAQ i think) explaining that they would reset stats with version 1.0. the reason is because they have expanded the algorithm to cover more possibilities, which has increased the running time by a factor of 4 for most clients.
Some clowns were running the old client in order to boost their stats. They knew that these people would continue to be self-serving and run the less thorough client unless they reset statistics. Anyhow... it is fresh territory.
Let's start finding some aliens.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
Anyone else besides me think that the RC5-64 project is actually counter-productive at this point?
It's my understanding that the point of the project was to demonstrate how 64-bit keys were not strong enough by showing how quickly a 64-bit key could be cracked by a large group of computers working together.
Well guess what, the current effort has been running for almost 2 years, and only 8% of the keyspace has been checked.
Sure it could be cracked today, or tomorrow, but all the project is doing now is making it look like 64-bit keys are very hard to break, making the argument for allowing export of larger keys less persuasive.
Just a thought. That's why I stopped participating a few months ago.
I figured out how to lower the priority:
This makes a dramatic improvement in NT's responsiveness. However, when you have to reboot (hehe), SETI@home.exe goes back to normal priority. Anybody know how to make this priority change permanent?
I rebooted my NT system to see what would happen and SETI@home picks up where it left off.
In actuallality, we're only capable of detecting radio transmissions of equal power to our own a few lightyears away (on the order of 20ly if I recall correctly) which is nothing in comparison to the size of the galaxy (100 million ly across).
What you use your CPU cycles on is of course your choice.
:)
But this is one of the things that I keep asking myself:
Why SETI? If there is intelligent life out there, somewhere, why is it important to search for it _now_? The way I see it, it is only a matter of time, and humanity can probably survive well without discovering ET.
I would rather suggest that we focus that energy on a search for potentially threatening objects in our own solar system; objects that could destroy our civilizations in one terrible smash.
We know for a fact that such objects exist, we just don't know how many of them there are, if their orbits will take them on a collision course with Earth, etc.
I think spending CPU time on analyzing images of the solar system, searching for such objects, would be much more worthwhile _now_ than SETI. SETI is fine. Let's do that when we are pretty sure that there are no 1 km or larger objects out there, coming at us. Maybe there are none. Great! But we don't know that.
I judge the continued existence of our civilizations to be more important than finding an ET somewhere, who we almost certainly won't be able to have direct contact with in less than a hundred years. Finding ET is all fine, but it won't help us much if -- in the worst case scenario -- we're all dead.
I suppose I should be running to NASA or something right now, asking for help with such a project, but my schedule is all filled up, so I'll just be cracking RC5-64 for now. It's just as useful as SETI@home, IMHO.
I hope we can get some more mirrors up, as the slshdot effect overwhelms those that exist.
Here is a link to the Windows EXE. Or, for the full directory, go here.
;)
Although how long that will last I can't say
/*He who controls Purple controls the Universe. *
www.gotontheinter.net
Updated vaguely once a whenever, maybe once a whenever-and-a-half.
I just upgraded from the .49 client to the 1.0 client. The overhead on the client has defineately been lowered. It doesn't drag a system down as much as in the past. It is noticable but not as hindering as past clients.
The client does indeed use spare cycles. Turn the client off and using top watch your cpu go to 98% idle. Now turn the client on and watch the idle time go away. Now notice that the client is running at a 1 nice value where everthing else has a value of 0. The seti client is indeed using only spare cycles. Besides if your real concerned do what I do and nice the seti client. Now it's nice value is 11 making it the lowest priority on the system. The thing that got me was the 12 meg of memory used. Even on a 64 meg system that put a hell of a dent in my it.
Oh well. Back to hunting for LGM.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Now your talking! Time for the penguin to kick some butt!
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Dude, you have no idea how Real Genius scarred me for life. :)
Jordan
You might as well run the RC5 stuff at the same time. The Seti@Home client is such a pig (on my box anyway), that I had to set it to run only in screensaver mode. So, the rest of the time, RC5 can be cracking away.
Jordan
I can't get excited about this. I think SETI is almost certain to be futile.
There are two possibilities. First, ETs may actively be trying to contact us. In that case, they will probably illuminate our solar system with a fairly powerful beam with a fairly obvious message: not one that requires distributed processing to decode.
Second, ETs might be accidentally leaking so much radiation into space that we can detect it. But that's unlikely. Broadcasting energy into space isn't very efficient. We will probably stop doing it within a few decades as better options become available. The chances that we are looking just when some civilization is going through it's primitive, wasteful broadcast phase is pretty small.
I'm still (apparently) in the Stone Age, running Glibc2.0 on a Pentium-233mmx.
I don't see a client for me on their unix download page.
Is this true? Should I just wait? I don't plan on upgrading to glibc2.1 anytime in the near future.
At least not on my *main* workstation.
Thanks
I was planning on running 1.0 of the client or nothing at all (sticking to rc5 which is not a memory hog.)
So even if someone hacks their SETI@home client to produce a false signal, it is going to be checked and rechecked by the seti folks before any kind of announcement is made.
Whether or not it is open source is irrelevant to any scientific value this project has.
Where is does matter is the fact that we can't compile an optimized version for our own platforms, we must rely on the seti@home people to do it when they feel good and ready.
I reckong it will take 3% of block done on PII-266. Considering that this client seems doesn't flush stuff till it's 100% done, machine should run 30 hours w/o break-off. It also seems, that in case if some luser turns off computer (I am running client on the Uni comps) I will have to relogin and start all over.
Am I the only one who thinkgs blocks should be way less in size/time? I would say few hours per block, or 7-8 hours (nightly run).
Also, it seems the client doesn't support MMX, or does it?
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com
alexc
Join Majestic-12 Distributed Search Engine
> it's not showing up in the system tray either.
I am in the same position -- NT 4.0, no Admin assess. However, there is a trick I used with distributed.net client, to hide it from tray. Easy hack -- got my fav. resource editor and made tray icon -- TRANSPARENT! Now, when I run this thing first (before other tray icons), you can't see it!
However, this won't work with SETI client -- when it runs full=mode you can't really do anything! This is because of priorities (I guess they will fix it).
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com
alexc
Join Majestic-12 Distributed Search Engine
I think so. Perhaps I should not have used word -- block size -- this is more from RC5 competition. I meant: DATA UNIT. It's too big. I am running the client for 4 hours now and it's only 10% done of the DATA UNIT. IT is my understanding that until the WHOLE unit is done, it is NOT flushed to server. Consider this:
1. It will take 40 hours on PII-266 to complete it.
2. I am running the client on my University computers. Guess what? They are shared. I can reliably run a client only overnight (so no sucker will switch off the machine during day time).
Since it will take 4 nights to complete the whole block I have to MANUALLY go from one machine to another to backup partially done units. If I won't back it up, they might be deleted on a user disk by yet another sucker in the University.
While I had RC5 client I could get 100 blocks to do them overnight and flush 'em. Now, I can't do so, manually backup stuff from 20-30 machines sucks!
So, by saying block size I meant UNIT SIZE, this has nothing with actual resolution, just make data less (not resolution), so people on a decent machine can do a unit overnight and flush it.
Otherwise, project is bound to lose some people like me -- who are not admins but can run processes overnight. I hope now I am clear.
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com
alexc
Join Majestic-12 Distributed Search Engine
This distributed project is mostly hype. Here's why.
First, because SETI@home is in no way affiliated with SETI. That's right. it's Just Some Guy.
Second, because the data being tested represents a relatively brief recording from an extremely narrow slice of the spectrum which most astronomers believe to be of dubious value.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
Easy -- make a new entry in inittab, on an unused virtual console. You even get keyboard control of it if necessary. Something like:
/dev/tty9 (and put a greater-than sign here) /dev/tty9
9:23:respawn:/usr/local/bin/seti (put a less-than sign here)
ought to work, though I haven't tested it explicitly myself. No parentheses, of course; bloody posting won't let me use the ampersanded or bare less-than/greater-than symbols.
I'd like to know how you got it set up on your box. all I did was set it up so that it boots every time I log into a user... can get a bit nasty some time. I'd like to actualy get it running automaticly the moment I boot into linux and have it run in the background without all the screen output and only one instance of it. I can't figure out all the piping stuff properly... I just wish I knew more about the commands of Linux... (still learning)
If at first you don't feel good.... suffer like the rest of us.
I feel so used...
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Now that's the right guy to talk to.. can't you make a statically linked version available? It should run on most if not all versions of Linux (the versions I have run so far have all been static). :-(
I'm sitting here with a bunch of now useless Linux boxes
TA
Arecibo's main function is as receiver, so you don't "hear" it at all. But occasionally they use it as a Really Big radar, and then you could "hear" it too, however no way you could hear it across the galaxy -- too much noise in between (and inside the galaxy is where you want to listen anyway). The FAQ at the web site says it could be detected 10000 light years away. But:
There's the big problem -- the beam is very narrow (a millionth of the total sky, according to the FAQ) and "hitting" something useful (like a civilization) is unlikely.
The point of the Drake equation isn't to validate any number you get out of it, it's the equation itself. You look at the equation and then you either agree or you don't that if you had numbers to put in then what comes out could be about right.
Then there's the additional fun.. if you do put in numbers you'll find out that the result is a very low number even if you vary the input between whatever extremes you are willing to accept as maybe possible..
TA
Thanks a lot, Steffen. It's really appreciated. :-)
The binaries are not available yet, but I keep checking.. although I suspect it will be Monday before they're there, nothing has moved since Friday (it's so strange to observe that people are not working on their pet projects in the weekends too, I'm not used to that
TA
Of course it grabs 98% CPU! What do you think spare cycles actually are? If you start setiathome on a "fresh" machine with only you hacking at the keyboard then your CPU would be 99.9% idle. That's the cycles setiathome will use. That been said, even though setiathome runs with a lower "priority" (nice value) you will notice it, at least if you try to compile or something. Because as soon as it has the time slice it will spend it, even though it is low down on the priority list of tasks to get timeslices. :-)
It's quite a bit different on SGI boxes, you just start it with e.g. npri -h 200 (or npri -w on the newest versions of IRIX) and it will be truly low-priority, i.e. you will still see it using 98-100% CPU most of the time but it will yield instantly (preempting the timeslice) as soon as something else want to run. You don't notice anything. Great! I got this great tip from a nice guy on a mailing list. Thanks, if you read this
TA
I agree it wasn't smart of them to go to glibc2.1, but the reason you see slowdown isn't because you went from i686 to i386, it's because the 0.42 version did only 1/8 as much work as the new version you tried. All the newer versions are slow, but don't run the older versions -- I'm sure they throw away any results from those versions, because they don't analyze the data the way the new versions do.
It still doesn't handle proxies that require authorization. Can't run it on my machine at work... sigh
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Um, as a matter of fact, YES! Wouldn't you want to watch their TV shows? Haven't you ever channel-surfed and found "nothing good on"? Well, alien TV may indeed be interesting. Just think: what are the chances of alien TV would follow the same programming guidelines and agendas as our own? About Zero. Do you have any idea what that would mean?
First of all, you'de probably have plenty of nude aliens. Yowza!
Second of all, their sitcoms, instead of being target at the 18-35 male range, would probably be targeted at the 650 year old sex-type-4C silicon-based audience. You'de find yourself wondering if you were watching a geology show or Baywatch.
You'de finally get to hear Shakespeare in the original Klingon!
On the Alien Discovery channel, you would get to watch all these great shows about alien psychologists speculating on human nature from what they learned from our TV shows. This would, of course, be hilarious. Imagine them trying to reconcile WW2 history with Hogan's Heroes.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Well, not exactly. There's a lot of physics unstated here, but a signal would decrease as an inverse square only if it was carried in a single frequency and propagating out into space uniformly.
If you either let it spread out in bandwidth or restrict the signal dispersion in space ("beam it!") then you change the loss to something other than inverse-square of the distance.
My statement came from Sagan and Sholvsky's book from about 1975, and it was about the Arecibo 1000' radio dish. It's simplistic, granted. But it's basically true. We could "hear" Arecibo's twin at a distance about the size of the galaxy.
Joe
No one's commented yet on SITI. So what if they succeed? So what if they don't?
It's sort of cool to realize that if von Neumann machines are possible at all, the galaxy would/should be filled with them in about 1x10**5 yrs. If we don't find them soon, it may be a strong hint that self-replicating machines aren't feasible, and e-m signals are a much better bet for finding life "out there".
We're already capable of detecting the equivalent of our own radio transmissions across the galaxy (more or less), and since radio is cheap and easy, it starts to look like we can detect anything in the galaxy that wants to be detected, and probably will within our lifetimes, if they're out there.
Now it gets into the realm of psychology. Why would intellegent creatures want to be detected after all? It gets real speculative, to say the least. It's also possible (or at least, not impossible) that we're either alone, or we're the first. After all, the assumption that there is nothing particularly special about our situation, an assumption that's served science very well for the past 400 years, is just an assumption.
The implications of both success and failure of SETI to detect extraterrestrial life are equally important.
Joe
Actually Win95 v4.10 is Win98.
I've been trying for an hour to download the Mac client from all 3 mirrors, can't connect to any of them. Can someone (Slashdot?) set up another mirror (or 3?)
(Alternatively, can someone ICQ it to me? 18102799)
Thanx,
CokeBear
Reality has a liberal bias
hardly. past setihome clients I've seen have caused noticable performance degredation on the server over all. at least moreso than other distributed computing clients. IMHO.
--jordan
And even then, how do you know your computer is worth trusting?? For all you know, "they" might have switched it with the HAL9000!
"Computer, open this document, please."
"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."
"But my name's William."
AAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
FTN.
OK, got the program, installed it on a spare NT box... How is this a screen saver? It pulls up the window, but that's it. It's not full screen and there's no way to password protect it. I musta missed something here. That and it's not showing up in the system tray either. Hmm, have to go log in as Admin....
Looks like you have to run the program, minimize it, and then it throws the icon in the system tray and the screen saver works. If you don't do this (don't run it, or close it), when the screen saver kicks in it simply pulls up a window with the client. Nothing in the manual about that. Must be a feature, oh well, there's alway 2.0 right?
Oh stop it, silly! *said w/ a lisp*
"Windows 98 Second Edition works and players better than ever." -Microsoft's Home page on Win98SE.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
Think they would get Hogan's Heros by now?
"Windows 98 Second Edition works and players better than ever." -Microsoft's Home page on Win98SE.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
jaz
Death to Argument by Slogan!! (This post twice-encrypted with ROT-13. Replies not using same will be ignored)
jaz
Death to Argument by Slogan!! (This post twice-encrypted with ROT-13. Replies not using same will be ignored)
jaz
Death to Argument by Slogan!! (This post twice-encrypted with ROT-13. Replies not using same will be ignored)
GhettOS
However if you're using CPU Doubler, you could tweak priority levels using a "Customized" setup. Of course, since one process can monopolize/wreck the whole system, I would not recommend running any cycle-eaters (SETI or RC5) while you're doing real work. Kick off the client when you're done working on the system. Better yet, join the linuxPPC mac daddies. Email me for more info on CPUx2; if enough interest is there, I'll post info at slac.com.
jaz (aka Sir Postalot)
PS gratz to /. on hitting 100Megahitz.
Death to Argument by Slogan!! (This post twice-encrypted with ROT-13. Replies not using same will be ignored)
I agree. I've gotten squat from the mailing list. They need to update the news section of their site more often, too. I think the model for doing this sort of thing right was the deschall effort.
...but there goes my keyrate. The odds of cracking rc5 are much better than my finding an extra-terrestrial signal, but this thing is way cool.
The 'spare cycles' bit is bogus tho. If you run it all the time expect a big performance hit.
g
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Since I grabbed the client earlier before it was /.ed, I have posted it on my site:
http://www.marsrobot.com
Play Well
All of the Mirrors that they list are FTP based - But the UNIX Version downloads are http based... So, I did a quick peek in the UNIX directory, and tada - the Windows client...
i athome_win_1_0.exe
:)
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/software/set
BTW - I also noticed that they finally came out with a Solaris x86 client
Can someone place the binaries on a usenet group (and post which one here)? That would distribute it over a wide region. Of course this just might not be allowed by the License either - not sure.
Here is the windows version http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/software/setiat home_win_1_0.exe On my 56k it took about 4 minutes.
Beau C
I've noticed that they dont have teams, wich kinda bummed me and my friends (no evangelista = no fun?) so, instead of joining a team i created an account for us MacEvangelists to work. if you go to settings | change/create login | login to existing account and enter foods@are.fun, you'll be on our team. Just imagine if a mac was the computer to find ET's... "The power to save the world... again". ^_^ anyways, happy hunting!
Don't even bring up the Drake equation. I could take a random guess and get as good of an answer as it does. All the numbers in it (possibly excepting # of stars and # of stars with planets) are a matter of opinion, which invalidates the math.
-Andy Martin
-Andy Martin
If y'all don't like me, blow me.
I can't get the latest versions to run. I get a seg fault and a core dump. I'm guessing it's because I have glibc2.0.x, but when I tried to run previous versions, all I got was something like "register frame info", I thought that was because it was compiled on a machine that had a more recent version of gcc than I have...
Way back in version 0.42, the i686 version was labelled as glibc2, and that worked great. I wonder why they moved to glibc2.1? Now I'm stuck with the i386-glibc2, which is *slow* (because I was a dumbass and erased version 0.42 before I tried out 0.45).
If someone would please upload one copy of all the clients to ftp://corpse.acm.ndsu.nodak.edu/incoming/ Then It would be available for others to get here
Is anyone else getting a "Data Read Error" when starting the windows SETI program?
Yes, very cool but...
...been receiving email about it 'coming up soon' and I find out about it being "active" on /..
I want someone from SETI@home to explain why I've been on the mailing list for almost a year
Gr.
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
Looks like they've reset the usage statistics like I thought I remembered they said they would. The top user now has a whole 4 work units. All my previous stats are gone (my pc at home must not be running it right now as I am still at zero). Hmm, guess i'll have to run home at lunch and see what the deal is.
The stats page is here.
I guess this is an incentive for new ppl to run this on as many machines as possible so they show up in the top users as before the to 20 ppl had something like, oh, 50 ga-zillion work units processed.
Since they've reset the work stats, Windows 95 is now the leading OS for completed work units.
/.'ers, crank up your boxen and make sure Mickeysoft gets shoved down far on the list where they belong!
We can't let this stand for even one minute can we?!?!? C'mon
so there.
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
Spare cycles my butt....Start it on a fresh machine and watch it grab 98% cpu....
I've posted a Mac mirror of the SETI@home client on our web server:
Karen
Global Mapping Systems - Mac GPS/GIS software
ps. Macs rule.
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GAT d-- a? C++ UX+ L++ P++ E--- W+++$ N++ o-- !K !w O---- M++$ !V PS++
I've been running SETI@home for a while - I've never had problems with it hogging the processor. Have the people who've had problems tried fiddling the nice setting?
"Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
If you're seeing performance degradation and you're running on *nix, don't forget to run it nice--15 or above should do the trick.
I've no clue if such a feature exists on the windows/mac clients.
Does anyone know how to set up a script which will run two clients (SMP) and dial up for data return/retrieval on demand from the clients?
Drake was at Cornell and I missed it?! Damn!
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Join us on EfNet at #seti@home.
Right now this is a support channel and open forum, live stats also available.
Looking for people to idle with us!
Ack! I'm also at work and dying to get this thing running on my nt workstation. Are there any windows mirrors out there accepting connections?
Head over to your nearest NT Command Prompt and look at our good friend START.
/low blahblah.exe
Example:
start
The part of the spectrum they are analyzing (the part the Arecibo telescope tends to focus on) is generally about 1.4 GHz (and ranges, according to Project Phoenix, between 1-3 GHz). This is the notorious '21 cm line' -- the wavelength at which certain hydrogen particles emit photons when their electrons change energy states ... that's the layman's explanation anyway, but suffice it to say that this part of the spectrum is about as much of the 'universal language' as we have been able to figure out.
Anybody bright enough to build something powerful enough to transmit/receive signals in space will know about the 21cm line.
-A
Yeah -- he came a few weeks ago to the Astro 299 class. Terzian and some others came to watch, it was quite fun. I don't think it was an open lecture though.
From what I understand, he stops by periodically (since he taught here for a gazillion years) but his schedule with SETI keeps him busy.
-A
Actually, Seti @ Home is very much affiliated with the SETI project. I attended a lecture given by Frank Drake (President of SETI) when he was here @ Cornell a few weeks ago and he devoted a good chunk of his closing remarks to the Seti @ Home project. Obviously it has access to the radio data gathered by the Project Phoenix team, and if you check out the Seti Insitute's home page, you will see several references.
/. would be doubly critical and skeptical of it) but rather a team of researchers, engineers, and Plain Old Folks who have the technical know-how to put together something like this. The idea is a lot of hype, yes, but so is the whole idea of SETI. The field of Astronomy is one of constant disappointment and extremely infrequent tangible discovery, but just the prospect of that discovery has kept the field (and projects like SETI, which is privately funded with a budget of $4 million a year, travelling between the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico ala Golden eye from Australia with a second, verification telescope in Manchester) alive for centuries.
So essentially, it is not 'some guy' -- it isn't a big cohesive government project (if it were,
No respectable astronomer with the ambition and drive to succeed, even when confronted by the 'astronomical' improbability of doing so is ever 'just some guy.' I regret that I don't have the physics knowledge to be one of them myself.
-A