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SETI@Home Breaks 500,000 years
Posted by
Hemos
on Wed Dec 20, 2000 09:48 AM
from the checking-the-universe dept.
from the checking-the-universe dept.
BoogieGod writes "The SETI@Home project has finally broken 500,000 years of computing time. They haven't detected any Extra Terestrials yet but there have been some interesting close calls. Now if only all 2.6 million of their users could join distributed.net."
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Do something worthwhile, folding@home (Score:3)
Simulate protein folding with your spare CPU cycles. It's a good cause, knowledge of how proteins fold helps determine the root cause of some genetic disease and can help researchers design better drugs.
Folding@Home [stanford.edu]
Granted, their screen saver kinda sucks, and there is no way to run the client without the screen saver, but I like the fact that I am contributing to a worthwhile cause.
Re:Do something more useful...on a Mac? (Score:2)
I'd love to, but running their client inside of SoftWindows [fwb.com] wouldn't be very efficient.
I agree that Seti isn't likely to succeed, but cracking ever-larger math puzzles has diminishing returns for me. I'd rather devote my cycles to something likely to help humankind.
Right now the only choice I've found is Popular Power [popularpower.com], but their client runs in Java, so it's possibly even less efficient than a Windows emulator. Ugh. It uses less memory at least. Anyone else know a worthy cause that runs natively on MacOS?
Re:Meaningless statistic (Score:2)
The number of units can be determined by multiplying this figure by the average time per unit.
Yes, a "number of units" milestone is more meaningful in terms of data processed. The number of years figure is a better measure of participation, which is also an important statistic.
Re:Do something more useful... (Score:2)
Because it was there.
Perhaps because the spirits O'Neil, Einstein, Fermi, DaVinci, Aristarchus, Curie, Alexander of Macedon, and definitely Sagan might say
Because it might be there.
and I and a great many other people do think
Because it might be there.
And we hope it is.
And to purposely annoy people like that schmuck Senator from Wisconsin who's name escapes me right now who railed against it saying
Don't spend money on little green men. Give me all the money to make more cheese. Or less cheese. Give me all the money. Science is bad.
Idle CPUs are the Republicans' workshop.
Re:Point 3 (Score:2)
Now even 200 years is a huge difference, to our culture. We weren't using radio/etc at all back then, let alone as much as we could.
If there's a bell-curve distribution of times at which races achieve our level of sentience/society/etc, and we're at the middle of that curve, then there're races which are at either end, the ones at one end may still be protozoa now, and the ones at the other end would have had civilizations like ours before mammals existed on Earth.
So, relative to what you must assume the high-end would be, we're probably fairly low, having come only far enough to recently begin asking these sorts of questions.
Then, there's the theory (is it fact?) that stellar evolution is faster towards to galactic core, with brighter, hotter, much more shortly lived stars, which would have produced those elements that life (as we know it) requires in a small fraction of the time that it took for our small cool stars to do it out here on the rim of the galaxy.
And a quick note, I think the original poster knew the speed of light lag was for both directions, I think they refered to that when they said we've only been broadcasting for a hundred years so only systems under 50ly away COULD be responsing by now. I think you just misread it.
Wow (Score:2)
Can anyone say, "Market Saturation" ?
Re:It's not our business (Score:2)
Re:Why SETI@home (Score:2)
Some actually scientifically useful work to do, unlike looking for ETs with a chance smaller than for cracking a 256 bit key...
IMHO, distributed.net should've dumped the RC5 project after the encryption export laws were changed and fully concentrate on useful stuff.
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Extraterrestrial bug ? (Score:2)
5th entry
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Re:close calls (Score:2)
Sounds a bit odd to me. The tin foil hat brigade would probably think they were trying to cover something up with that lame explanation. I think they're just being a bit too cavalier (read "incompetent") about the whole process.
Re:science (Score:2)
This isn't a slam - I find the stuff interesting. My point is that there is probably a much broader appeal in the science of SETI.
The chances of locating some signal from space originated by intelligent life is, of course, very very small. Obviously, hundreds of thousands of people think it is non-zero. The potential impact to human society of discovering ET intelligent life is huge. That's what draws people, I would think. (plus, it is a pretty screensaver).
It is a lot easier for people to understand the potential impact of SETI than that of discovering Golomb rulers.
Re:Do something worthwhile, folding@home (Score:2)
-josh
500,000 years and nothing to show for it (Score:2)
Another project to help: YETI@Home (Score:4)
Cheers,
--fred
Nice Graphs... (Score:2)
They have some nice graphs of user statistics. What I would like to see is average time per work unit vs. time. This would provide empirical evidence of Moore's "law".
1 thing distributed.net lacks... (Score:2)
(There may already be a client like this that I have missed.)
Re:Arecibo (facts about) (Score:2)
intelligent life (Score:2)
Why SETI@home (Score:4)
I switched from distributed.net to SETI@home, and here's why: I know a key can be broken with brute force; I wonder if there's life on other planets. It's the mystery that draws me to SETI.
Re:Forbidden Link (Score:3)
I can get to it intermittently.
Spoiler alert...
Spoiler alert...
Spoiler alert...
It basically says that they got some funny clusters of spikes in their data, and couldn't explain them... until they noticed that the spikes' dates correlated with downtime for the 'scope.
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Re:500.000 years computing time? (Score:3)
You (and others who were also bitching/wondering) are missing the point. The reason for celebration isn't that a x amount of years were done; nor is arguing that it could have been done in x/100 hours on decent machines a worthwhile consideration.
The point is that 2.5 million people, between them, have been running their computers collectively for half a million years. Doesn't matter whether this was on 8088s or top-of-the-range z80s, the owners' computers were running, in total, for that time. This is, IMO, a phenomenal achievement.
Speaking of Distributed.net... (Score:2)
So how about some help? [distributed.net]
I mean, what's the point in discovering extraterrestrial life if we can't crack their private key? :)
Re:Why SETI@home (Score:3)
Instead of trying to break encryption stuff by brute force (hey who need to prove you can do it in xx time by actually doing it. it's a simple math formula, it can be proved in a few minutes). If distributed.net proprose to break some algorithm with some new techniques that may requires a lot of CPU but that need to be prooved that's it's more effective than brute force, then I will be glad to donate CPU time to distributed.net.
At least in SETI@Home, there is some science going on. These people try to prove something and they develop great tools and analysis techniques in doing so.
Put some science into distributed.net, then you'll have more users.
ps: add some pretty screen saver too, so users not interested in science or encryption can enjoy it.
Don't be discouraged (Score:5)
SETI at home hasn't officially found anything yet. What they mean by that is that they haven't found something that repeatably looks like a signal.
This doesn't mean that we're alone in the universe, for four reasons:
The best thing about SETI at home is that it shows that you can harness vast amounts of computing power for a good cause with modest cost. Folding @ Home [stanford.edu] will hopefully get comparable attention.
Re:500.000 years computing time? (Score:2)
I kind of disagree. With 2.5 million users, and Seti@Home being around for a couple years now, that's a lot of time people AREN'T running the screensaver. Let's say over a period of one year, at 2 million users. They've been around longer than that, and they've gotten more users, but let's just use those numbers. So, that's two million years worth of potential computing time and they've racked up half a million years of actual computing time. So each person is dedicating less than 1/4 of their potential computing time to the project. That's an average of six hours a day. Most people sleep more than that and you can't tell me, no matter how much time the average slashdotter spends on their computer, that most people are on their computer 18 hours a day.
No, SETI@Home isn't getting very high marks in the dedication department. More people would rather turn their PC off than allow it to run overnight to help out SETI.
Of course since the largest group of SETI@Home contributers are running Windows I guess we should forgive their poor uptimes.
Steven
Re:Distributed.net vs. Seti@home (Score:2)
Re:500.000 years computing time? (Score:2)
That's just silly. Would you judge the success of the Beatles based on the number who've never bought one of their records?
No, SETI@Home isn't getting very high marks in the dedication department. More people would rather turn their PC off than allow it to run overnight to help out SETI.
And I'm one of those people. So what? Could the 35 years of time that I've contributed been higher? Yes. But the aim for most users isn't the same as yours; they (we) feel that we're making a contribution, and that we're not dedicated simply because we don't leave machines running all night. Nor are we guilty for the occasaional game of freecell or quake 3 that means fewer units get done.
I can't speak for others, but I'm happy that I'm contributing to a project in the way it was intended.
Re:Someone Explain... (Score:2)
We all know that brute force can break encyption. By doing it, we demonstrate how simple it is to do.
Re:When is this going to be commercially exploited (Score:2)
Given the existence of spyware, I would guess that they already are. We just don't know it yet.
Speaking of which, I once saw a Web page where a guy talked about a demo Java app he had written, which would harvest "spare" cycles from client machines where it was running.
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Do something more useful... (Score:4)
Re:Do something worthwhile, folding@home (Score:5)
That said, it doesn't give you the right to diss those who want to contribute their cycles for the sake of the search for extraterrestrial life. A confirmed reception would have profound implications, far more than figuring out how a protein folds. So far, we haven't... and that does not invalidate the search.
The linux client runs without the screensaver. (Score:2)
Re:Why bother with distributed.net? (Score:2)
Re:1 thing distributed.net lacks... (Score:2)
The distributed.net client uses IDLE cpu time. The client runs all the time.
http://www.distributed.net/faq/ [distributed.net]
please, I've contributed to the FAQ for dnet: read it and learn.
Wisconsin , Cheese, and Idle Clock Cycles. . . (Score:3)
Who, with Walter Mondale, later to be VP, killed the "Station" part of the "Shuttle/Station" project in the early 1970's. That's right, we could have had a real space station, 20+ years ago.
And as for Idle CPU's. . .as I recall, Proxmire was a Democrat. . .
No OS/2 client either (Score:3)
Checking out Seti's results by OS [berkeley.edu] shows some interesting info. In the 90 OSes listed, MacOS is #3 in results and OS/2 is #20. Linux is #6. Based on SETI's results, F@H should have done the Mac client BEFORE the linux client.
shaekespeare@home:) (Score:3)
what a waste of energy (Score:3)
yeah, whatever (Score:4)
Every thousand years
This little sphere
Ten times the size of Jupiter
Floats just a few yards past the Earth
You climb on your roof
And take a swipe at it
With a single feather
Hit it once every thousand years
Till you've worn it down
To the size of a pea
Well, I say that's a long time
The more interesting statistic... TeraFLOPs/sec (Score:4)
Wow.
-S
Arecibo (facts about) (Score:5)
I hate to nitpick, but Arecibo is not a volcanic caldera, in spite of what the tabloid press might report. In fact, it is a large limestone sinkhole in the karst terrain of Puerto Rico: check out this link [naic.edu] for more info. (I promise its not a goatse.cx link [goatse.cx].)
One of the cuter stories is that when they were searching for the perfect site on Puerto Rico, they took a dime and slid it around on a contour map of the island - and where it fit nicely inside the contours, there the dish went... Its amazing to look at, and I recommend a visit if you vacation in PR.
OTOH, your other point is completely correct - Arecibo only sees a limited range of the sky, and cannot view anything south of a certain declination (14? I forget). Not being able to see the Gal;actic center is particularly galling! That's why the new GBT [nrao.edu] (100m, unlike 305m at Arecibo, but the GBT is fully steerable) is so exciting.
distributed.net has a better project than RC5 (Score:4)
Re:what a waste of energy (Score:3)
Re:1 thing distributed.net lacks... (Score:3)
I dropped SETI@Home when I found out that they were recycling old blocks. What a waste of computing resources! My distributed.net client never runs out of good work to do.
How about a useful project (Climatic Modelling)? (Score:5)
Extra Terrestrials? (Score:5)
We've got some spares, if that's what you're looking for.
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Meaningless statistic (Score:3)
Re:What other services/researches are there? (Score:3)
I go for this one because it seems the most useful and important one out there. At the moment, it's Windows-only, but it shouldn't be too hard to find a Windows computer somewhere that the app can reside on. :)
Re:Because it's interesting to see (Score:3)
The other important role of the SETI screen saver is how it catches OTHER co-worker's attention. *MY* numbers might not be important, but the fact I got 10 other co-workers into it, and eventually became fanatics is.
I think a compromise of setting the screen saver portion to blank out after an hour is a good solution. No one (at least here) is going to see it running at night for 9 hours. Even if SETI@HOME was to rewrite it so it was twice as fast... it would only help them by a factor of 2, not a huge factor compared to the 2.6 million people.
Rader
Why bother with distributed.net? (Score:3)
At least SETI has a clear goal, and is a useful (and entertaining) pursuit which is naturally parallelizable. Other systems (PopularPower [popularpower.com], etc.) also have useful things you can do with 'spare' cycles (at least if you're not the one paying the electric bill).
I fail to understand why anyone is advocating spending cycles on hunting for random numbers, a la distributed.net . Care to enlighten me?