Slashdot Mirror
Seti@Home Now Has Teams
Madoc writes "Was just over at Seti@Home's site, and saw that they've introduced teams now! There are 2 Slashdot teams, we should probably standardize on one:
Slashdot.org
and
Team Slashdot "
I vote for Team Slashdot. Go seek out new intelligence if
this rocks your boat better than cracking DES keys.
Distributed.net is running out of energy...
I don't know about you, but I'd much rather have my name go down in history as a co-discoverer of the first ever found alien intelegence than get my share of $10000 (I believe that dist.net is offering $1000, correct me if I'm wrong).
Closed software, what did you expect ?
Alien chicks will flock to your door.
FWIW, my dual-PPro machine completes a block every 4-6 hours; a K6-2-300 takes over a day. Odd; I wonder if the authors tried some odd optimization or assembly-language tricks which are backfiring on some processors.
According to the seti@home stats pages, the Linux machines are taking substantially shorter average times per block than are the windoze clients.
Now, if seti had done their stats as well as distributed.net, we'd be able to look at actual decent per-processor analyses. Oh well.
My Imac takes about 11 hours.
That's weird.
personally i thnk the mersenne prime search is the most important, OGR is probably more then the prime search, but untill distributed.net gets the new, better client running im not going near it, but SETI isnt that important,and this is coming from someone who spends way too much time on irc ufo channels, think about it, the SETI project ran fine without the help of distributed computing, think about all the cable they can steal with that satallite? if ya ask me the whole project is just done so the people on the SETI project can listen to cell phones and get free cable:)
My PPro180 box (linux w/32mb) is almost exactly as fast as my P2-450 (win98 w/128mb). My P2-300 (linux w/128mb) is almost twice as fast as either.
Pretty odd.
I've tried the SETI client both under linux and in win98 with the same machine. It takes me just around 40 hours to complete a block in win98 and about 8 hours in Linux.... same hardware, only difference is the OS.
Something is up.
Is there a nice gui interface for SETI yet, you know one that would fit nicely into gnome's panel (basically a dockable app maybe?). Thanks.
What's the prize if your computer finds intelligent life? A new car?
By the time ET life is discovered, Jodie Foster could be in her eighties, I wouldn't exactly want to spend 24 lust filled hours with an 80 year ols lady.
I personally send all my credit card statements back with a check and the statement taped to a post card... I have nothing to hide and I trust the loyal and honorable employees at the post office not to read my mail during transit.
I also don't lock my house and leave my keys in the ignition in my car and the windows all rolled down when I go into stores. If you can't trust people in this world, who CAN you trust? There is no reason to lock doors or use encryption when you can trust that no one will tamper with your property.
Weird. My UltraSparc I takes about 21 hours. Cannot be that much slower then Imac.
Come on, how fast supercomputers really are?
I bet even the best are not faster then 1000
PCs (unless heavy matrix computations are involved). The power of PCs is increasing so fast
that supercomputers do nor make much sense. They become outdated shortly after they are built. NSA probably had some pretty good equipment, but
nothing to compare with 300000 computers SETI has now.
but what if the person to find the SETI results is a woman? what then? 24 hours with stephen hawking? yuck.
I have a K6-2 300; running Linux it only takes 19.some hours to get through a chunk.
I'm running the windoze version at work on a PII-233 (I think... I know it's an older PII...) and it's been going for "-366" (?!?) w/o coming close to getting done...
It's very easy to jack your stats this way...
Just be logged in as one user, change to another user, and submit.
There's a number of exploits to their user system.
Um, no.
The person who posted that added the top members to slashdot's rankings.
You've been had.
Personally, I'm VERY upset with this, as I can't tell where our team REALLY is in the rankings now.
By the way - your password in plaintext is in one of the text files in your seti directory. I'll let you see which one.
Yet ANOTHER bonehead programming mistake from these guys. The Windows client is just AWFUL. I'd really like to see the code, see how many bugs there are...
But yeah. You can add anyone to your team if you know their email. Very simple to do.
You really think the Berkeley team joined slashdot's effort? Um, no. And that's why they're no longer on your team list.
You guys better audit the team...
This might be reliable or might not, but looking at seti@home's own stats pages, the average WU time for win95 is 45/55 CPU hours, 32h for NT4, 25h for MacOS, 17hr for Solaris and Linux.
Hmm. 95/98 have miserable memory paging systems; Linux has a fairly good one considering the lousy x86 memory bus architecture. The motorola PPC CPUs are excellent but the bus is pretty slow except for the more recent G3s. All that core the client allocates for itself -- how much of that is trying to get through the bus at any given time? For the i686 gnulibc versions, 13-14MB of core gets allocated and gets paged to often enough that almost none of it goes out to swap.
Very near? How near? What a silly thing to say. It's not impossible that we are alone in the Universe.
ac.
How to configure the client on NT 4.0 to run with blank screen???? It has no such config options. I am not Admin, so I can't access ControlPanel.
I always suspected that the thing runs slower drawing pretty pictures, on P2-266 it makes a block for whopping 40 hours.
Running the client as a screensaver with minutes to blank screen set to 0 reduces the runtime on my win98 celeron 450A system from 28-29 hours to 10h 45m (note: this only works when run as a screensaver, not when run in the background)
Anyone know if the gnulibc1 clients are slower than the glibc2.1 one? I've only got glibc2.0, and can't be bothered to upgrade if it doesn't make a difference.
:-(
BTW don't try it on a really old machine - I just killed it on my 486 and put that back to running rc5des. I think it would have taken just over a week a block
It's pretty obvious from looking at the Team Slashdot members, that the top 3 (now that Michael Bolan and UC Berkeley have been removed) are still hacks that they've grabbed from the top 100 individual rankings.
This is really unfair to other teams who are trying to "compete" in a friendly fashion (inculding Team User Friendly!) who are trying to do this legitimately.
Wanna know how do do this? It's so easy it's insane.
Let's say you want to add Michael Dolan to your team. You get his email address (which is clearly displayed in the top 100 individual list) and change the logon in your Winbloze client to this email address. The user info in the client display will now tell you that you are Michael Dolan.
Now look in the program directory for "user_data.txt" or some such. Open it up and look for the "key" value. This is Michael Dolan's password! Bingo, you now have his email and his "password" - add him to any team you like, or all of them if you want! Wanna have more fun, add the top Big companies to a team, or Berkeley themselves! Ha ha!
Distributed password in plain text format? How STUPID is that?
Everyone is saying that making screen saver blank in control panel (for Windoze) makes the thing run x2 faster. Questions is: since I am not an Admin on NT4.0 box and can't do so, would the thing work faster running all the time in task-bar???
In theory, since it's minimized it doesn't have to draw anything, and thus run at fool speed. However, Berkley guys were sooo smart not to include obvious options to turn that picture off.
[after 20 minutes]
I was running the client minimized and it seems to have same (slow) speed. It drives me crazy to know that some guys get x2 units on the same machine, but different OS! And this is problem of the damned client.
This started last week. It's too late to catch up now. Why didn't Slashdot report on this last week when it happened?
What the re they thinking? They think we're stupid? For all they care, they could be using some of our processor cycles for other uses that are for profit or something...
Make it open source, I want to see EXACTLY how this damn thing works.
If the source were available, people would just hack it to bring up their stats. This means they wouldn't even process the data, just report that there's no evidence of life in any of it.
Should the chunk of data you're client is analyzing actually contain some extraterrestrial intelligent signal, will it notify the user running the client? Or will it quietly report its findings back to NASA HQ so that the announcement can be "properly handled", which for the announcement of the conclusive existence of extraterrestrial life, means never.
Heh...as of 3:11 PM
Seti@HOME's "Join this Team" functionality is broken. The page (before it 404ed) said they were "reworking their Team pages".
Heh...seems like the Slashdot effect strikes again.
Darn...I want to join too...
I'm having the same problem with the Solaris 1.1 client. Do any of the text files indicate percentage complete? According to the last access time on the logs, they run for 17 hours or so, then just hang there. They don't retrieve another work unit, and they don't seem to transmit what they've done (based on the seti@home web statistics).
Hmm, perhaps under NT you could (only when you wanted it to run since it does not really play well as a background task in windows) set it to work all the time, then minimize it. That should/might fix the slowness unless it goes ahead and renders the picture anyway. But that would be absurd, so I doubt it does that. Hope this helps. ,which linux has basically *none* except the extremely small number that have been ported to it (A gamer cannot live on Quake alone) I refuse to restrict myself to the meager offerings that linux has in that area. Once I get another harddrive, it shall return.
A slightly off-thread note:
I had run the linux client and was getting about 10 hours or so per block and my celeron 450 w/ 128 Mb ram, For reasons beyond my control (I needed the hardrive space for games), I was forced to zap my linux partition. The windows client was taking 30 hours or so (I had shut off the blanking option) After turning back on blanking, my time per block dropped again to around 10 hours per block. I've read alot of posts in this topic that are adamant that the *nix clients are more well written, windows is 3X slower, etc. Well, in my experience they are roughly equal. The linux client is faster, but only by a small amount. However, considering the OS overhead of windows compared to that of linux and the almost exact speeds, I'd have to disagree with those posts and say that the windows client is written at least as well as the other versions (the computational part anyway, the graphics part has some problems... the display shouldn't be so complicated that it takes twice as long to calculate as the actual calculations that it is displaying). And before replying with posts that berate me for zapping my linux partitions, consider this, I have access to many *nix boxes and I can do pretty much anything I can do with linux on my system through a telnet session and since I enjoy playing games on my system
I'm with SETI@home. First off, thanks
slashdot'ers for exposing the password problem.
Now, we've fixed it and we'd like to test it, so
come on back! All the team names are intact,
but we removed all the members. Of course, when
you join a team, the team gets all of your
credit (so you're not starting from scratch).
Hi Guys,
:-)
First of all, thanks for giving us so much amusement by trying to claim that Slashdot found the security problem. I guess adding the top 5 individual users to your team was YOUR idea, huh?I guess you thought Michael Dolan and Berkeley were so impressed with your site that they decided to join your team?
Anyway, as you can see the SETI@home guys have introduced a new all-singing all-dancing secrity system to the program. Want to know what it is?
You know the OLD problem of being able to use the KEY value from user_info.txt? Berkeley's fix is to now use the ID instead. So, the same hack works - just use the ID value for the password and bingo - Michael Dolan can be your friend too!
Don't forget to add the top 5 individual users to your team, Team Slashduh!
Or look at the intelligence behind the 'fix' for the password problem...
Oh gee, I wonder if they'll compare the new password to anything... naw.
Let's use the Email address next! no one will guess that!
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgi?cmd =team_join_form&id=3453
Slashdot do it again! We found the new bug! Or, at least, someone posted about it on our site so we can claim credit for it...
I just got these. It's so simple - man those SETI programmers are lame.
mtdolan@mtu.edu 333
seti@mmnt.millennium.berkeley.edu 194002
Those are the "passwords" for those people. The password IS the same as the ID number in the user_info.txt in the seti@home dir.
I do support the SETI@home project... it is a neat activity to participate in.
However...
Has it occured to anyone but me that if there is indeed intelligent life out there, and it is relatively close by, that they might not be spending a large portion of thier time as an advanced civilization communicating via __RADIO__?!! (Especially with all that space static out there...) It seems like such a quaint technology... I bet in 20 years or so WE won't even be using radio much anymore...
Who's to say that most or all extraterrestrial civilizations don't use some *other* means of broadcast and communication, and radio technology is simply something shortlived, primitive, and unique to this world?... (like sticks and stones from our extraterrestrial peers' points of view...)
-Josh
Actually, you can participate in the 23-mark Optimal Golomb Ruler search already, and you can even help find good starting points for distributed.net's future OGR searches (when that happens):
http://members.aol.com/golomb20
I think it's one of those Quad Xeons
running Windows NT server. They always
to be so blisteringly fast.
Actually you can run SETI@home on several
machines provided you have the same login
on each machine (see the SETI@home FAQ)
The NSA may have all the horsepower in the world,
But that's not the point
What we're saying is that the NSA doesn't
nessessarly have a log of systems administrator
snitches out there, and cracking into 1000's of systems
is a lot more work than just getting some zelous geeks
to install some software on thier own systems that
will give them the "backdoor" into them to snoop around
automagically. Then encript the data for them alone to analyze at thier leasure.
I wonder why team slashdot has all the top users that have their email visible?
holy loophole batman
I see that Micheal Dolan has been properly removed from team slashdot. They need to fix this damn teams exploit... I mean, using the key in the userinfo for the password is just DUMB.
Yes, it would be nice to finish one contest before moving on to the next, but look at the RC5-64 stats! It's been running for 577 days and we're only through 8.5% of the keyspace. Now I know, we're cracking at speeds faster that ever before, but still, it's proven to be fairly strong crypto and all we're doing now is wasting distributed CPU power which can be used for much more usefull projects. I've personally switched over to SETI@Home ans I've noticed a lot more press about it than the RC5 contest. The reason? It impacts a lot more people than encryption. How many people care about strong encryption. Ok, now how many people have stared up at the stars wondering if we're alone in the universe?
One of my (two) biggest complaints with the seti@home project thus far is that most aspects of it have been under-engineered. Not enough time has been put into developing any aspect of it, save possibly for the cruncher algorithms themselves. Distributed.net did a far better job of delivering clients for platforms, assembling a good server-side package, proxying of many sorts, copious configurability, SMP and CPU-specific processing cores, etc.
All that said, the SETI project does stand to yield something more useful, at least psychologically -- the time spent beating on RC5 has mainly (and successfully) demonstrated that DES-56 sucks, and that bigger keys are vastly harder to break. If there came another rapid DES-breaking project such as DES-II or DES-III, I'd happily switch my spare CPU cycles back to it for a day or two.
Also, the source to seti@home isn't available, a problem which they have yet to rectify. If they desperately need to protect the algorithm for scientific integrity, they can move all that to a library and open the rest of the source so that we can fix the missing parts.
Wow, just imagine the implications... Joe Celery's computer receives the block, the one block that has a transmission from intelligent life forms. It's a hot day outside, and his "kewl 504A" is just a tiny bit hotter than when he left it running the Unreal timedemo all night to see if the chip was stable. Due to a random heat-related glitch, his computer mistakenly reports the block as not containing anything interesting, so it goes unchecked.
Five years later, an alien demolition team wipes out the entire Milky Way to make room for an interstellar frontage road, a procedure that they had advertised (via radio beacon) for millenia. All life on Earth perishes because of an overclocked 300A, whereas if Joe Celery had not overclocked his chip, humanity would have made first contact with an alien race and Joe Celery's name would go down in the history books.
Now wouldn't that just suck?
Wanna know how do do this? It's so easy it's insane.
Let's say you want to add Michael Dolan (top individual user by miles) to your team. You get his email address (which is clearly displayed in the top 100 individual list) and change the logon in your Winbloze client to this email address. The user info in the client display will now tell you that you are Michael Dolan.
Now look in the program directory for "user_data.txt" or some such. Open it up and look for the "key" value. This is Michael Dolan's password! Bingo, you now have his email and his "password" - add him to any team you like, or all of them if you want! Wanna have more fun, add the top Big companies to a team, or Berkeley themselves! Ha ha!
Distributed password in plain text format? How STUPID is that?
Two points:
1. The statistics for CPU time for Windows 9x include the time it is staying minimized in a System Tray doing nothing.
2. To speed up processing time in Windows 9x dramatically (about 3x in my experience), turn on screen blanking in the screen saver properties.
Account maintenance should be finished soon.
-Peter of the SETI@home team
Run it in screensaver mode and configure it to blank the screen. It goes 3 times faster when it's not bothering to draw the pretty pictures.
The Windows client has two settings, run as screensaver or when the pretty window is frontmost, or always run.
I've left the window up, but not frontmost and it still is displaying graphics, so who knows how reliable that is. But I think when it's minimized it doesn't run, or is terribly slowed down.
You've been reading HHGTTG. Funny books (I thoroughly enjoyed them), but come on! Any race that could do such damage would just waltz on in and do it without bothering to fill out council forms. If the council got snarky, they'd wind up being scheduled from demolition as well.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Now, I'm not positive, but I think that zip code probably cooresponds to a certain base (fort?) in Maryland.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
- A $60,000 machine built by the EFF beat out all
the King's horses and all the King's men
(otherwise known as distributed.net).
- The NSA probably would have considered Deep
Crack (the EFF's key buster) a keen and useful
computer -- twenty years ago.
So, unless you've got some really serious reason to think otherwise, I'd stop worrying about a few bits from SETI, take my medication and start looking for little green men like a good little member of the Collective. Besides, there are better things out there to worry about, like the war in Kosovo or a 1 cent increase in the price of a stamp.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
My common sense tells me that if someone wants to send back falsified results, they'll send back falsified results. It's been shown time and time again that OBSCURITY != SECURITY. Just because the SETI project is closed doesn't mean that their results are not being falsified at this very moment, because it just takes a little more dedication to screw it up. The only really secure protocol/program/anything-else is one that's been peer-reviewed and shown that it's secure, which means things like checksums, encryption and accountability. It's my opinion that the SETI program is in fact more vulnerable to cracker efforts because it's closed -- a vulnerability in the system, once found, will probably not be brought to light before the results are completely and horribly skewed - after all, if they don't give us the code to review, why tell them when there's a problem in it?
It's not impossible that we are alone in the Universe.
It's also not impossible that all the air molecules in the room will jump against one wall, leaving you in a vacuum to suffocate. However, the odds are against it, and most of us firmly believe the odds are against their being only one intelligence in the universe.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
They really need to come out with a Personal Proxy like what Distributed.Net has. That way you can get cool stats like this!
If they make one, third party stats scripts will come. I promise it.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Posted by GothstaiN:
InET is participating in the SETI@Home project. We Think that SETI is the most important activity of the last months, because is'nt only about the people colaboration for an "invented" project...is the people colaboration for a very USEFUL project.
Imagine that human race discover an extraterrestrial civilization...With the people's work SETI is very near of that purpose.
Posted by Synsthe:
Maybe I'm missing something terribly important about them, but I don't see anything at all important about finding large prime numbers.
Somebody shed a little light on this, perhaps?
My beige PowerMac G3 at 266 MHz with 32 megabytes of memory just took a week to complete its first work unit, and the CPU time counter racked up "only" around 70 hours. Something is badly wrong.
In addition, when I tried to have it contact the server this morning, it managed to send its results back, but then refused time and time again to retrieve any new data. I switched it back to guessing RC5 keys, at 850 kkeys/sec.
By comparison, my Linux box, a 300 MHz AMD K6-2 with 96 megabytes of memory, goes through work units in about 16 hours.
I think I'm using the i386-glibc2.1 binary on there. Should I try to the i686 binary instead? I don't understand which processor model (386, 486, Pentium, PPro) is right for the K6-2.
Other than when I fire up Quicken, I've let it run as the foreground (and only) application and turned off all screensavers and other power-down features. I haven't tried moving it out of the System folder though. I'll try that.
So are you happier that your team "won", or that there's evidence of alien life?
;)
(and do you win $10000 in Alpha Centauri duckets?)
I think that SETI@Home really wins the usefulness contest. --- However, perhaps we should finish the one contest, that we know we can finish, first! If all but one person leave the DES contest, that one person will eventually get rich while the rest of us give our CPU fans a workout.
-Ben
I have been trying for hours to upload data and download some more cpu fodder. Guess they need a more scaleable server.
woohoo
GacK
#941
Too late! A NASA probe, launched several years ago, proved there was no intelligent life on Earth. (I think the article was in Nature.)
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)
Penguin Power?
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)
Wire up a satellite dish, point it to the same bit of sky, and see if you get something comparable (minus resolution & gain)
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)
I'm running NT5 SP5 on a Compaq PII machine. THREE DAYS PER SODDING WORK UNIT!
If Linux gets it down to one, I might not have pulled all the hair out of my head by the end of the week!
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)
Through intelligent lifeforms from outerspace trying to hide themselves :)
Except it would look for signs of intelligent life in the packet, NOT try to decrypt it :).
Maybe I'm being paranoid, but did anyone notice in the processor stats that i386 (bottom entry, #33) had 0 blocks received, but 1 returned? Exactly how did that situation come about?
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
macs are really really slow aren't they?
You want a bad score? My Cyrix 233MX took nearly 70 CPU hours to complete one run in Windows 98.
Well, all the Linux client does is spew out a bunch of text every now and then...
Slashdot is doing OK, but what about a Team Linux?
Deleted
Let me guess, the plans for the frontage road were on display at the local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty years. Or were they actually in the cellar of a planning ofice, at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"
--- Linux... a college project gone horribly right
I'd rather see more intelligent life on this planet before I spend my energy looking for it elsewhere. We have some short sighted morons making emergency presidential orders about privacy and encryption may be used to aid pedophiles and terrorists? There are a few serious flaws in that logic and reality and its a matter of principle. Until we can enlighten or remove the figureheads in office, I will waste my 60 watts of idle processing power to make a sad political statement.
I would rather look for intelligent life elsewhere, but I think it is more urgent to look for it here first.
Suppose you're a government agency, and you get hold of some important encrypted data. No problem -- just dump the key into the seti@home processing queue. Instant free cycles from enthusiastic geeks all over the country, of whom many are privacy advocates who've been participating in various distributed cracking challenges over the years in attempts to protest your authoritarian policies. O, sweet irony.
Dan Wineman
The concept just has a certain perfection to it. ;-)
Join the team here
We joined the Seti-At-Home project two years ago, for what that's worth, but the project itself has only just begun...They have problems with server overload fairly often; please be patient as they figure out how to deal with these typical new-project problems.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
It has been working on the same block for 197 hours. It is a P90 with 48M Ram and service pack 4.
However my dual pentium 400 with 320M ram running 2.2.5 has crunched out about 50 of them in the same time.
Even my poor P60 with 24 megs of ram is can do one in about a day and a half fast. That is running 2.2.9.
Ken Broadfoot
Ken
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
Congratulations... Obscure Benchmarking unexpectedly wins the day.
Umm, why did this man's comment get bumped to -1... some moderator's personal vendata? there doesn't seem to be a good reason... so CmdrTaco, or Rob Malda, when you grep the threads for your name, find the guy that did this and kick his ass.
Earn cash in your spare time! Blackmail your friends!
What? We all wanna dedicate our computers to finding "intelligent life" elsewhere in the universe? We haven't found any on this planet yet, why are we looking elsewhere? Just look at the most popular writers like Jon Katz and Matt Drudge for evidence that planet earth contains no intelligent life. . .
** Martin
I dont see the problem with this being closed software, if it was open, people could learn how to send back falsified results, screwing them all up... Read the docs.. it tells ya a lot.. [then use yar common sense..]
Stan "Myconid" Brinkerhoff
SB.
Depending on your processor, you really shouldn't need 50 hours.
;)
As well as running it on my Linux box (PII 333) which averages 11 something hours per block, I also run it on my PowerMac 8200/100. Its been going for over 135 hours and is on 94% of the first block. This thing eats CPU time. But hey, what the hell else would I use the Mac for?
He got moderated down because of that "I'm first" tag. First posters are a no brainer for the moderators. And if it weren't for them, there might even be moderators...
Which one of the two systems is more useful? Distributed.net or Seti? I think Seti wins between those two... Though, isnt there another one of these types of things that looks for extremely large prime numbers? That one is probably the most useful out of them all.
The client is not going to know if it found intelligent life. It is going to know that it cranked out some numbers which might be suspicious. The quantitative values would be duely reported and the interesting findings checked again using dedicated telescope time. As far as any announcement, I can't imagine that it would not be reported as at least a possibility. What happens after that I don't know. Carl Sagan's book, "CONTACT" (which I highly recommend) dealt with this issue in a reasonable fashion. The movie was pretty good, too.
-Steve
I see the top member of Team slashdot is Michael Dolan with an average time per block of 9 hr 27 min. OK, he probably has an Alpha or some other fast CPU.
But what is the story with Bert, in the number 5 slot, with an average time per block of 7 min 51 sec? What kind of system cranks through a block 70 times faster than an Alpha?
Team #Amiga! Beats Slashdot! For how long, I dont know... ;) I have my 6 computer working on Team Amiga! (Damn that linux client is fast) -Brook
Same login, different machines BUT different block units too. You can't process same unit in "parallel" on X machines.
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com
alexc
Join Majestic-12 Distributed Search Engine
And you might want to set the "minutes until blank" to 0 otherwise the screen saver activates and then the graphics shows up for "minutes until blank" then the screen blanks
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
We've also got a Team on SETI@home. You can find out info about it, along with tips on optimising your SETI@home client software on the Club Team homepage.
Enjoy,
Kris.
Win a Rio (or join the SETI Club via same link)
I have an AMD K6 233 Mhz, a P166, and a 486. I've been running rc5des on my AMD K6 and was running SETI@Home on the P166 and 486. I noticed the P166 and 486 seemed really lagged when connecting to them (even though they where connected via 10BaseT Ethernet). When doing a top, SETI@Home was using majority of CPU (how suprising), but a LOT of RAM too. This was on both machines, which really seemed to suprise me. On my AMD K6, rc5des was using almost no RAM.
Has anyone else noticed this? I'd like to know to see if it's just me or not. Because if it's not, I can wait for new clients and hope that the RAM usage is less.
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I read somewhare on the page (the FAQ, maybe?) that they'll list you as a co-discoverer in any articles they publish.
It's not $10000, but it's still cool.
peter
But the nice thing about Linux is that you can bolt the program down so tightly (separate user, chroot) so that it cannot do any damage - it'll never find my pornography or any of my other dirty secrets ;-) (hmm, me reaches for the man chroot command anyway)
Having said that I think it's not really feasible for these guys to give out the source code, because it allows malicious people to write something that'll send fake packets back saying "okay - I've found nothing". This would be a grossly irresponsible thing to do but I wouldn't rule out a cheat who would want to bump up the team's "block count" up a little or religious fanatics whose beliefs depend on there being nothing out there. Security through obscurity, perhaps, but I can't think of any other way of protecting against cheats.*
Despite that I'm still a little irked off about it myself as I'm forced to sit behind a non-transparent proxy and twiddle my thumbs with a cluster of about ~16 decent machines that are just itching to join in the search for extraterrestrial life. If only I had the source I could have written that proxy bit myself already!
*By the way it's probably only a matter of time before someone actually reverse engineers the program. Security through obscurity has always ended in tears.
The win client does not run very 'nice' at all so to say... When I had the client running and configured to be active constantly, I too noticed a serious responsiveness impact. Turned out the dumb thing ran at normal priority. Even switching it back by hand the the lowest priority still gave me the feeling it was clogging something. Besides, I had the DES still running as well, which I could see being totally repressed by the SETI client. Needless to say, I dumped the SETI. I don't mind spending spare cycles, but I don't want it to interfere with my normal work. I haven't tested the SETI client on an SMP box.. Maybe I'll do that this weekend. Anybody else did this?
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'We have no choice in what we are. Yet what are we,
but the sum of our choices.' --Rob Grant
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'We have no choice in what we are. Yet what are we,
but the sum of our choices.' --Rob Grant
The 7 minutes is clearly a bug in the client, or a configuration problem on the computer which makes it abort the processing right away. They guy figuring high up on the list with 7 minutes processing time said he had just one single 200 MHz Pentium running NT. In other words, it should have taken 60 hours not 7 minutes (I have essentially the same setup right here). :-)
Presumably the others in the stats with around the same times suffer from the same bug. The setiathome folks should fix the clients and rip out the bad results from the stats. I assume it will happen at some time in the future
TA
To avoid the Vogon effect you're describing they should send each work unit out for processing twice, and compare the results.
TA
It certainly doesn't multithread in the Unix version..
Maybe it's the graphical part that is able to multithread (or maybe NT multithreads the graphical part for you), try to turn off the graphics (by setting the screensaver to blank the screen, in the control box). Others report that this cuts the processing time to half, if it doesn't for you but merely unloads a CPU you know what's going on..
TA
Hold your horses, the database server is off-line and has been for many hours. Before there it had been acting funny for many more hours (not recognizing user names, so impossible to set up teams).
Try again tomorrow.
TA
Sure you can write your own proxy even though you don't have the source. /etc/hosts file (and if you have a /etc/nsswitch.conf then set it to check local files before DNS of course).
A netstat shows that the client connects to sagan.ssl.berkeley.edu, and a 'strings' on the binary shows 'shserver.ssl.berkeley.edu' which turns out to be the same as 'sagan' right now.
So just make something that can take the connects from setiathome on port 80, and forward it to shserver.ssl.berkeley.edu port 80 (and the other way). Put this 'something' (which also understands your local proxy system of course) and put it on a computer that looks like 'shserver.ssl.berkeley.edu' for the client, you can do that just by putting a fake entry in the
You can probably do it in Perl.
TA
I second that.
;^)
Team Slashdot, we find aliens and crash wussy webservers.
-- 100% MS-Free as of 4-4-1999, 11:47:38 PST. "The lapdance is always better when the stripper is cryin'" Free Kevin,
For anyone from or interested in the beautiful country of Sweden, you may want to consider joining Team Sweden. At the moment I'm the first one registered for the team, but there is a group of us that was already working as a "team" before they setup real teams. Check out the stats for Team Sweden here. There are currently about 80 machines happily processing data.
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I wouldn't put too much value in the current ranking of the teams. The work units are not being added up correctly. Take a look at Team Sweden to see what I mean. You can see the stats for Team Sweden here. For the team it shows the total work units as 62, but the the top team member it shows the (correct) value of 80. I have already reported this bug using there bug report form, so it will be interesting to see how much the stats change once this is fixed.
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Hmmm, make sure you are using the 1.1 client. I was using the old clients from the beta testing in the beginning and then realized that those units don't count. Depending on your processor, you really shouldn't need 50 hours. I'm averaging about 16 hours across the 75 machines I am using.
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I have three machines running on my account: a Pentium 200 running redhat 6, a PII 400 running win98, and a PII 266 with redhat 6.
The PII with rehat is the fastest, completing keys in about 8-11 hours (my estimates are bad because I am on dialup I don't have diald set up yet to automatically dialin)
The PII 400 is slower than the P200 running redhat by about 20 hours! I don't understand why. The graphics cannot be taking up that much processor time, and the 400 has 4x the memory of the p200!
My guess is that the unix clients are better written than the windows clients because the latest releases are available on Unix first. Plus, running it in text mode can't hurt. I haven't tried running the Linux client with any of the GUI front ends, though...that would make an interesting comparison.
Its more likely that the data was downloaded during the beta period, and wasn't uploaded until after the new databases were zeroed and online. This makes a lot of sense because those damn intel 386's were so slow.
digitalunity
the only way to fix it is to flush it all away...
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Does this mean that forms we type our seti passwords into will use POST instead of GET to keep our passwords out of the URL?
My Heart Is A Flower
Team Slashdot is ranked #1 now on in the clubs.. 143+ users!!!
Of course it take 180hrs for me to process a packet.......
"Windows 98 Second Edition works and players better than ever." -Microsoft's Home page on Win98SE.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
I really don't see what you mean by that. As far as I can see, Distributed just keeps gaining speed. The plots show that the curves just go up, up and away.
Phobos - Greek word for fear or flight
Don't want to be the devils advocate here, but afaik (no, i did'nt try the win client yet..) the windows version only run's when it kicks in as screensaver, while the unix clients run at nice 1 all the time .. Which seems a waste to me, when you type in some text in word there should be some cpu time available.. Maybee they need so much memory that it would slow down MS-word too much? Ok, could be that win has that bad Memory Managment that it just doesn't work good while other things are running...
I have a lab of six iMacs at school, and before i upgraded to OS 8.6, they averaged about 60 hours, after upgrading to 8.6, they jumped to 36 hours, but that is still nowhere near your 11 hours, even our 300mhz G3 takes about 24.
Do you run the screen blank or with the graphs?
I agree. I still think it has something to do with the graphics being drawn on the PC version (i'm assuming the linux version really doesnt draw the graphics)
I'd rather have a fast time than pretty graphics...
I wonder if the slowdown is in the OS itself or the client.
My Pentium-II 300 takes an average of 40 hours of CPU time to process a block running NT. I noticed that i686-pc-linux, the average time is about 11 hours. All of the average linux times are faster.
Is the linux client faster? Or are linux users just running faster computers? Maybe it's all the graphics the Win/Mac versions draw that slow them down.
A couple of the people in the top 100 can do the SETI blocks in 7 minutes. Yikes.
I special hardware involved?
Because the SETI client doesn't multithread in it's current version, that would have to be one honkin' processor. Or a parallelizing compiler.
>This should be the next poll.
>
> (I'm first!)
And I'm seconding.
(The poll idea, that is).
Thanks, I'll be checking the site for it.
BTW, good job with the clients - it's nice to eat up the spare cycles doing something that matters.
Sigh. I wish they'd implement a way to edit your setiathome user info. In fact, I think they should have done this before adding the teams - as soon as I give them my email address I'm stuck with my old settings and there's nothing I can do about it.
Gripes aside, I'm still running the client because I think the project is so important.
Nice catch. I was only running version 0.46 (not even a full week ago when I got it from the official site). BTW, 50 hours was for 7 blocks, not one (K6-2-450/128MB/Linux 2.2.9).
Vrallis
I've put in about 50 hours of processing time or so under the Linux version so far, receiving 7 blocks up to this point. I have yet to show any results being posted to SETI@Home. I do have an outfile.txt (running around 1.5k so far). After the database came back up, I even tried to get back in using setiathome -login and logging back in. Does the outfile have to reach a 'critical mass' before being sent?
Vrallis
Well, it's nice to see the moderators are paying attention. I assume that I was dropped to 0 because the post had nothing to do with the topic.
The reason I put this here is because I assumed that *someone* would be interested in knowing the movie had been aired, and what it was like; this news was hardly worth submitting as a story, after all. This seemed as good a place as any, due to the general lack of interest in the subject and wandering threads. Obviously someone disagrees with me, and that's fine. But really, moderating me *down*? I should at least get some credit for posting something that is actually geek related (as opposed to, say, asking what the prize is for finding aliens).
(Yes, I know I'm not supposed to whine when I get moderated, but this seems a bit much. *I* never moderated anyone doing something like this. (Whoops, I wasn't supposed to say that, either, eh?))
Okay, i have to amdit it: i have no idea what the point of the prime number search is. It's relatively obvious that no matter how many orders of magnitude you go out to, there'll always be one or more prime numbers for it. So you're not going to prove anything by fining one. Perhaps knowing a prime number with more digits than there are bits in this message would be helpful.. but danged if i can think of how.
As for the whole encryption thing: do you need to break a lock to tell it's strong? If i take a padlock and slam it with a sledgehammer a few times and it doesnt so much as dent it, do i need to keep hitting it until it breaks? Another poster mentioned the encryption project is only at 8.5% after 577 days of running. Considering nobody's going to be going to the trouble of writing a distributed client to crack the encryption on my various transactions, i think we've proven it's plenty strong already.
Then you get the seti-at-home project.. it's kinda out there, there's no proof that it'll ever produce a signal.. but the whole point is 'what if it does'? Even if the senders have been dead for a billion years and we get the alien equivalent of the I Love Lucy show, which is really more imporant? The completely un-marketable and utterly useless in a practical sense knowledge that intelligent life isnt a) a fluke or b) the will of 1 or more gods, or proof that an ecryption key is strong enough that some kid wont be able to crack it on his pc for at least a couple dozen years?
Dreamweaver
"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
use the screensaver with the "blank screen"-feature enabled (seti-screensaver settings). this increases performance on 95/98/nt systems dramatically. the gfx stuff obviously comsumes more than 20%...still slower but not _that_ poor.
greets from switzerland
sascha
Big black eyes and cold gray skin? Eww.
I really doubt its usefulness (finding aliens?) and all this processing power should be used for something more useful, like finding large primes or compiling win2000 : )
So what are the team prizes for finding aliens then?
Part of their warp core?
This should be the next poll.
(I'm first!)
The teams database appears to be working again..
If you are running the client it might be worth joining Team Slashdot.. Lets get our name to the top!