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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.
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 sincerely doubt we'll find much anything several million light years away, especially given that our own galaxy is some 100,000 light years across. If you had read anything at all about the project (which it appears you haven't), you'd know that our radio receivers are pretty much capable of receiving most terrestrial-strength radio signals only in the better part of our galaxy.
In all likelyhood, if our galaxy is indeed teeming with life, the signals we receive will originate a bit closer, on the order of a few tens of light years, perhaps a bit further.
At that distance, one or two two-way messages could be sent and received in my lifetime.
What's this about our physicists? What makes you think we CAN invent some sort of faster-than-light communication? Stop putting people down because they can't accomplish the impossible or don't know how to approach the extremely improbable. Why don't you go invent it if you know it can be done and how?
If you think this whole SETI thing is a bunch of crap, fine, just don't run the program! Remember, we're all volunteering our CPU cycles for distributed tasks like these. I personally think it's worth it.
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)
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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
One the computers of the people that wrote it. Are you afraid their going to be doing weird things to your computer? I feel sorry for someone so paranoid.... I'm off to hunt for aliens now...
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).
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
Spare cycles my butt....Start it on a fresh machine and watch it grab 98% cpu....
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?
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!
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