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500-fold Increase in Data Flow from SETI Telescope
Posted by
Soulskill
on Thu Jan 03, 2008 08:12 PM
from the et-in-crystal-clear-high-defintion dept.
from the et-in-crystal-clear-high-defintion dept.
coondoggie brings us an article from Networkworld about a flood of new data for the SETI@home project. We discussed something similar a few months ago when a new telescope array went live. The vast amount of processing power required to handle the new data is prompting the SETI@home team to make a plea for more volunteers. Quoting the press release:
"What triggered the new flow of data was the addition of seven new receivers at Arecibo, which now let the telescope record radio signals from seven regions of the sky simultaneously instead of just one. With greater sensitivity and the ability to detect the polarization of the radio signals, plus 40 times more frequency coverage, Arecibo is set to survey the sky for new radio sources."
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New Telescope Array Goes Live For SETI 159 comments
The Skinny writes "Today is a historic day for the SETI program. The New York Times reports that astronomers are flipping the switch today on the Allen Telescope Array — 350 antennas, each 20 feet in diameter — which will, among other things, extend the search for extraterrestrial life a thousandfold. From the article: ' There are some 200 billion stars in the galaxy, and a significant fraction of them have planets. Estimates of the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy have ranged from one (or none, if you are particularly discouraged about human affairs) into the millions. Dr. Shostak calculated that the full Allen array would be able to detect a signal from as far as 500 light years that is only a few times more powerful than what can now be sent by the Arecibo radio telescope, a 1,000-foot-diameter dish in Puerto Rico that is the world's largest (although it is in danger of being shut down to save money). That translates to about a million stars, which he said was getting into a promising number. Dr. Shostak described the expanded search as looking for the needle in the proverbial haystack with a shovel instead of a spoon.'"
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sounds like (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
come on, people! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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All the evidence says that us being alone in the universe is next to impossible.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I got the plea to rejoin the effort, and told them exactly the same, no way Jose till its fixed. No reply, as if I expected one.
--
Cheers, G
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Hey Nostradamus! (Score:2)
FoldingAtHome (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent is right. (Score:3)
The cancer and other medical projects your can donate your processing power to are far more important then a fruitless search for aliens.
Re:Parent is right. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
oh I dunno (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is silly. The goal of life is maximize overall satisfaction, not accomplish one single highest goal. It's important to rank your priorities, of course, both as an individual and as a society. But the notion that because A is "more important" than B implies ipso facto that A should get all the resources and B should get none is maximally silly.
Indeed, it's kind of OCD obsessive to always be focussed on pursuing the Top Goal, the kind of thing that when we see people doing it in practise -- giving up everything, including enough sleep and good nutrition, to, say, play World of Warcraft and become the biggest baddest player -- we conclude they need to do some growing up.
Parent
Re:oh I dunno (Score:5, Funny)
1) Breathe
2) Sleep
3) Procreate
4) Eat
1444) Find Cure for cancer
2137832) Find extra terrestrial intelligence
Ergo when I have some computing power to spare I'll devote some to the cure for cancer, when I have the United States's entire Internet worth of computing power, I'll spare a little to extra terrestrial intelligence
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:oh I dunno (Score:5, Interesting)
Finding this in the parent's post is left as an exercise for the reader.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
After having upgraded to so so many more modern computers (I must have
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Benefit of SETI (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:FoldingAtHome (Score:5, Insightful)
So what are you doing here, wasting your important CPU cycles?
Parent
Parent is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because you think you know what people should do, doesn't mean you do.
Parent
No, You're Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Did I say that people's spare CPU cycles should be mandated to SETI? As if that were feasible or even possible?
When I say that Protein Folding *should* take precedence over SETI, I'm simply making an appeal to people's personal priorities--and mine favor understanding and curing diseases over inconclusive alien signal-hunting every day of the week.
Yes, you're free to choose for yourself what cause you want to help out. As you should be. And I'm free to try to persuade others to help a very worthwhile cause:
http://folding.stanford.edu/ [stanford.edu]Parent
Re:FoldingAtHome (Score:5, Insightful)
Find a protein, you change many lives for the better.
Find ET, and you change the course of the human race forever.
I will choose what to do with my extra CPU cycles myself, thank you very much. To me, ET is more interesting.
(Yes, I should know, it was my computer that discovered the candidate object for SETI@home back in 2004. Got on TV and weekly reader for that. What have YOU done with your spare CPU cycles?)
My only regret is BOINIC runs so crappy and is so hard to manage (come on, install a program that crashes upon resume, gotta dig out the right profile, gotta figure out how to sign up for projects = fail).
Parent
Re:FoldingAtHome (Score:4, Funny)
Congratulations! You accomplished nothing and yet managed to get on TV for it. You're right up there with Paris Hilton.
We're obviously each free to choose whatever project we want to donate our spare CPU cycles to (or none at all, if we so choose). Nonetheless, I would encourage people to support projects like Folding@Home over projects like SETI@home, mostly because even if we do discover the existence of ETI, the consequences are unpredictable; assuming they're not close enough to visit or communicate with in a reasonable timeframe, then the sole effect of the discovery would be to cause chaos amongst humanity (how many religions would go berserk apeshit if they discovered that Earth isn't God's special place after all? -- on the other hand, maybe a lot of religion would go away once people realize that We're Not Special, and that'd be a nice side benefit -- but still, very unpredictable).
It's also exceedingly unlikely that SETI will ever find an ETI, regardless of whether there are any ETIs out there. F@H, on the other hand, has already provided us with a lot of useful information about biology, and is clearly advancing the cause of science toward the specific goal of curing diseases. As a result it seems like a much better investment in MY long-term health for me to be spending my cycles on F@H.
Parent
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Yes, but spending your spare cycles on protein folding will actually accomplish something.
Re:FoldingAtHome (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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Some poster mentioned it earlier: If you priorities is to spend youd budget on the best way to save lives then research into Cancer or AIDS isn't the best place to put it, even within the medical research field. There are other diseases that kill far more people but get far less research dollars than Cancer/AIDS already! The money goes into areas where the research companies think there will be t
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Protein Folding should take precedence over pointless searches for noise-in-patterns.
Distributed computing isn't an either/or proposition. Right now the BOINC infrastructure hosts at least 42 projects, and at least three of those are health related (malariacontrol.net [malariacontrol.net], rosetta@home [bakerlab.org], predictor@home [scripps.edu]). When a volunteer starts BOINC and joins a project, they are presented with a list of many projects.
If SETI@home gets the 3 to 5 fold increase in volunteers that they hope for, it's a very good bet that every other BOINC based project will see significant increases in their volunteer base.
Left seti when they went to bonic (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Left seti when they went to bonic (Score:5, Interesting)
Me too. Last time I used it the Linux install involved way too many steps. It is packaged as a 'generic' Linux binary, and left up to the individual to tweak it to fit their particular system. I am quite happy to contribute spare cpu cycles to the project, but at the moment I don't have the spare sys-admin cycles required to setup, configure and babysit the software.
If they want more people to install it, they need to do something like create a RPM installer and setup a yum repository. If the installation was as simple as 'yum install bonic' plus a simple Python configure script to set the project URL, then ReadHat could/would probably add it to Fedora. Which would mean that 1000's of people would see it listed in the install options, and some of them would probably give it a go.
The other reason I left was the change in the way that stat were reported. When I started, their website showed a headline figure of number of CPU years in the last 24hrs. To me, seeing that figure increase as the project gained more users was a real incentive to add machines and contribute more to the project. It gave you the warm fuzzy feeling that we were all contributing to what was at the time one of the largest computing projects in the world.
Now everything is listed as teams competing for 'credits', whatever they are. I didn't join to earn 'credits', I joined to participate in one of the largest collaborative computing projects in the world.
Parent
Re:Left seti when they went to bonic (Score:5, Informative)
gnarayan@munin|~> apt-cache search boinc
boinc-app-seti - SETI@home application for the BOINC client
boinc-client - core client for the BOINC distributed computing infrastructure
boinc-dev - development files to build applications for BOINC projects
boinc-manager - GUI to control and monitor the BOINC core client
kboincspy - monitoring utility for the BOINC client
kboincspy-dev - development files for KBoincSpy plugins
There are plenty of tools to convert debs to rpms
Parent
YETI@Home (Score:5, Funny)
Arecibo Shutdown? (Score:3, Interesting)
To sum up what this increase in data will bring: (Score:5, Funny)
Six hours nineteen minutes right ascension, fourteen degrees twenty-three minutes declination
Six hours nineteen minutes right ascension, fourteen degrees twenty-three minutes declination
etc. ad infinitum
are the cycles really "spare" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:are the cycles really "spare" (Score:5, Informative)
Processors are also built to run at full load, as long as it holds a good steady temperature (say 50C) you might see its lifespan decreased from 30,000 hours to 20,000 hours. What they're not built for is constant temperature cycling between load and room (off) temperature. Turning your PC off at night will likely have the same affect on its lifespan as constant load does. Again, to me at least, it's worth it. I replace the CPU every 2-3 years anyway and have yet to see one KIA.
I do think, though, that Folding@Home is a better investment than SETI. Not that I'm not curious about finding life out there, but there are more important things to do here first.
Parent
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carbon footprint? (Score:5, Interesting)
Arecibo? I thought they were closing it? (Score:5, Interesting)
How wasteful is SETI? (Score:5, Insightful)
But how is contributing to a project that was the basis for mainstreamed distributed computing any more wasteful than blowing 9 hours a night on WoW? I'd love to see a breakdown of the increased energy usage from a high-end CPU and a good video card vs. a PC that's on anyway and running BOINC when it's idle.
Screaming "carbon footprint!!" about something as trivial as BOINC is the real waste. Here, I've swapped 80% of the lights in my house for CFL's, and I burned 10 bucks worth of electricity last month (with an electric heater and 4x computers in the house no less!) does make me green enough to spare some processor cycles now?
Fucking ignorant (Score:3, Insightful)
Of all the things in the world that monumental amounts of energy are 'wasted' on each day (powering bin Ladens dialysis machine,lighting the creationism museum,all the power used by all the dictators and oppressors of the world who shouldn't be allowed to LIVE let alone use resources), 'wasting' a few of them LOOKING FOR FUCKING EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE doesn't even come CLOSE to being classified as a 'waste'. FUCK! Am I at the wrong site?!!
700% increase (Score:5, Funny)
What seems to be overlooked about SETI (Score:3, Insightful)
I would note that there is no fundamental reason for this axiomatic proposition, and it makes much more sense simply go with the data rather than stubbornly cling to a belief for which there is so far not a shred of evidence -- much as the creationists do with regard to geology and archaelogy, I would note.
Maybe sometimes some evidence will appear for ET life. That will be interesting, if so. In the meantime, we have a rapidly growing contrarian body of evidence, so we should accept as our tentative conclusion that we are, in fact, the only life in the universe.
Aliens vs. Foldator (Score:3, Funny)
wow, really seems like 50/50 to me...
BOINC better be inobtrusive! (Score:3, Informative)
Come on, I want to install the client, configure the SETI task and settings ONCE, then forget about it completely and forever, let it run in background without reminding me of its existence, ever, period. I do NOT want my desktop cluttered by an extra tray icon. I've ditched it.
The old SETI screensaver did not display anything on the desktop while not running.
I hope people realise (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope that people realise that by covering 7 regions of the sky instead of one, and 40 times as much spectrum bandwidth as before, assuming that aliens are as likely to emit on any of these frequencies (which after all is not such a bad assumption considered we don't know a thing about them), statistically that will make us discover alien signals 280 times faster than before.
Very basically, that means that if we were say 1,000 years from finding an alien signal with the previous setup (which you can't say sounded so unlikely, I mean we barely listened for 40 years, and not always with the means we have now), we are now 3 years and a half away from that instead.
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