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SETI@Home Breaks 500,000 years 228

Posted by Hemos 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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SETI@Home Breaks 500,000 years More

SETI@Home Breaks 500,000 years

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  • Do something worthwhile, folding@home (Score:3)

    by joshv ( 13017 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @06:05AM (#546771)
    500000 years? what a monumental waste. Why waste your CPU cycles on pie in the sky alien searches or breaking some encryption key you already know can be broken?

    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.


  • Stupid people should not have the right to vote in the first place.
    And they let you vote?
  • With PCs sporting 450W power supplies these days, containing as many as five fans, and having video cards that get hot to the touch, turning the whole thing off is a good idea. 5 fans are nothing. What about those of us using water cooling and peltiers? Perhaps it is a frivolous use of electricity, but it is a hobby. But so is auto racing, and that burns resources like nobody's business. We all have something that we like, and may sacrifice a little to keep us happy. Now Christmas lights... those are a waste! :)
    --------
  • Oh don't worry about it.

    Running SETI@Home is very much a waste of time

    If thereare Little Green Men, and they have such advanced technologies as to flying around in saucers all over space.... they know we're here... and they'll contact us when they're damn ready to speak to us.

    Put your CPU cycles to better use... like curing disease or creating stronger encryption.

  • produces actual, useful scientific results

    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?

  • what would you think if you were running dist.net client for 3 years doing rc5 cracking and d.net suddenly discontinues the project. most of users would switch to "more trustful" project because they dont want their work to be discarded.

    As opposed to SETI@Home, which in the past has provided already-searched blocks to clients to search again? Not that I necessarily have a problem with redundancy, but I got the impression at the time that nobody knew this was going on and there was some upset about the issue.

  • 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.

  • Hillary (Hilary?) on Everest:
    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.
  • I browse at +6 so you better be God.

  • Re:I helped!!!! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    > Single handedly...5000 hrs.

    What were you doing with the other hand ?
  • I think it's safe to assume we'd be around the middle of the pack, evolution wise, if all life started at the same time as it did on Earth. A few asteroids, slightly different conditions... We could have arrive anytime around now, plus or minus a hundred million years.

    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.
  • Check out www.processtree.com; someday day they hope to pay you for your spare CPU cycles.
  • There is already a distributed.net worm [honeynet.org]. More info [distributed.net].
    ---------------------------
  • If had had that much computer time, I wouldn't spend it on finding aliens.

    I'd do something useful like encoding MP3's!
  • yeah, seti@home had bunch of problems in the begining, one of those was that people were patching clients to improve their speed. seti@home didnt want to accept those patches because they were not being validated by scientist, so they started discarding units from lots of ppl, later they found that they still might be lots of units that were accepted and were coming from patched clients....

    when it comes to redundancy they do every unit 3 times, which is i guess okay if you want to be sure that there are no chance of units being wrongly processed. distributed.net does every key/node twice...

  • Wow (Score:2)

    by ch-chuck ( 9622 )
    but there's a lot of idle cpu's out there with nothing to do - and even then only a small % are connected to SETI@home. And investors are wondering why PC sales are tanking.

    Can anyone say, "Market Saturation" ?
  • You can also disconnect your phone if you are not interested to know what happens outside your house. Don't use internet. Don't watch TV. It's all waste of time and energy, because you don't not care about the outside world.
  • Cool, someone caught the reference...
  • yes...and a refresh cleared it up.
  • Hey I didn't attack anyone.

    Do we quote just to look smart and rational or to illustrate a point other than that I'm a bad guy.

    My suggestion that Seti@home is a search for god is perhaps a bit too philosophical for you. Let me explain.

    For many, faith is assurance that the hell that is their life will not be an eternity. It embodies hope in the face of hopelessness. It is the greater purpose to match that horrible feeling of smallness and powerlessness. It suggests that their efforts in faith will endure for their children after they are gone. That is the believer's search for god.

    For others it is a routine that helps them feel superior to others. They make no contribution, no real effort. They just partake and think that's enough.

    The search for extraterrestrial life is the search for another place like home, but perhaps better. A more advanced, evolved human-like creature is often imagined. It gives meaning to drudgery of every day life. We technology folks are not just going through the motions, we are part of something colossal, like having an active hand the evolution of man. This is the athiest/agnostic science worshiper's search for, err, god (by a different name).

    For others it is a routine that helps them feel superior to others. They make no contribution, no real effort. They just partake and think that's enough.

    Or maybe I missed something. Maybe it is REALLY REALLY important that we find that we are not alone. Oh, because we'll solve our fossil fuel dependence.

    Or maybe this IS about our definition of ourselves and how we fit into a grander scheme. And maybe grander scheme DOES mean grander scheme no matter how you go about searching for it.

    Nah. You're right. Or rather, I could say you were right, IF YOU EVER MADE A POINT.

    Oh, my imagination gland hurts. I need to rest.

    Sounding smart and being smart are not the same, dude.
    /Jarrod
  • Obviously you've forgotten that unless we explore space and set up permanent colonies all the Earth exploration won't do our species much good when the supervolcano erupts, the next big rock slams here or the Sun finally dies killing us all.
  • > This is the o/s that will defeat windows???

    Nope. Windows now uses Alien Technology (tm).

    --
  • Huh? It would appear that linux-gnu systems have contributed an infinite ammount of computation to the project! 6) linux-gnu 12672647 NaN years 2147483647 hr 2147483647 min 0NaN sec Weird! heh. here [berkeley.edu]
  • "Now if only all 2.6 million of their users could join distributed.net."

    I might be talking out of my ass, but from the little I've read on distributed.net it seems like they make redundant goals. Break the RC5 algorythm by brute force? Whoop-dee-do. They know they have the computing power, they know how to do it, and they knew that with enough time they'll break it. So why are they trying to prove something they already know. It's kind of like "let's dig a hole, and fill it back up just to see if we can do it". Yeehaw, go to town fellas!

    At least Seti@home has a goal with a defined purpose, and it's something that many everyday people see worthy enough to dedicate their resources to.

    "I can only show you Linux... you're the one who has to read the man pages."

  • The best argument that we are the first or most advanced species in universe is simply the fact, that we are alive. Sounds strange?

    Even without faster-than-light-travel a species with slow interstellar spacetravel could colonize our whole galaxy with a virus-style expansion in less than 30 million years. These are very conservative numbers done by some very anxious physicans, I would guess that it could be done in much less time. As our galaxy is around 10.000 million years old, it could have been colonized more than 300 times even before humans as a species had formed.
  • I'm guessing it means that the number of real-world-time seconds that machine have put into processing blocks adds up to 500,000 years.

    10 seconds on a 8086 and 10 seconds on a PII is a total of 20 seconds - regardless.
  • That's what the OGR Project on distributed.net is for.
    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.

    --------------------------------------
  • I tried browsing at -1 (everything visible) for a while. That became annoying. Then I swithced to 0, so you filter out everything that was moderated down. After a while I still had to browse to a shitload of first posts and flamebaits. So regretably I had to switch to +1.

    I created the signature that apparently pisses off you so much to piss off these people that caused me to do this. It really works great because invariably the moderated down replies to my posts are either insulting or meaningless trolls.
  • Look at the results per CPU/OS [berkeley.edu]...
    5th entry ;-)
    --
  • What the hell were they doing releasing data to be analyzed from a period when the gear was broken in the first place?


    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.

  • think the difference is interesting science... interesting to more than a handful of people who find mathematics remotely entertaining.

    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.

  • Well, folding@home is not sponsered by a commercial drug company, and they are publishing their results. Even if it were run by a drug company, so what? Would you rather cough up so money to buy a drug and live? Or not have the drug, save the money and die?

    -josh
  • I think the only thing that they have shown is not that there is any intelligent life out there, but that the power company probably is now richer than bill gates, andrew carnegie, and john t. rockefeller combined ever were.

  • Another project to help: YETI@Home (Score:4)

    by f5426 ( 144654 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @07:20AM (#546814)
    Check it here : http://www.phobe.com/yeti/ [phobe.com]

    Cheers,

    --fred

  • 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".

  • ... Is a pretty client. Get a nice screensaver-client that shows you what you're working on, and distributed.net will get more users.

    (There may already be a client like this that I have missed.)

  • Wow! I think the parent is the highest rated and perhaps, first legitimate use of a goatse.cx [goatse.cx] link!
  • I think we should look for intelligent life on THIS planet first.

  • Why SETI@home (Score:4)

    by tag ( 22464 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @05:56AM (#546826)

    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)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @06:09AM (#546827)
    > It seems the link for the "close calls" is forbidden?!? Anyone care to repost what it says somewhere?

    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.

    --

  • Re:500.000 years computing time? (Score:3)

    by rde ( 17364 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @06:12AM (#546829)
    Exactly what do they mean with 500.000 years computing time?
    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.
  • Team Slashdot [distributed.net], the once proud leader of the overall RC5 stats is getting clobbered on a daily basis. We're barely in the daily top5 these days! Team Anandtech is now #1 in the overall stats and the way it's going, we're about to tumble another place...

    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)

    by javatips ( 66293 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @06:12AM (#546831) Homepage
    That's also one of the reason I still give CPU time to SETI.

    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)

    by Cujo ( 19106 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @06:13AM (#546832) Homepage Journal

    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:

    1. They're only looking at a frequency band where we would expect to fnd a signal if someone were deliberately trying to contact us. If someone were sending out beacons in random directions, then the signal wouldn't be straightforwardly repeatable. So, they'd have to know we were here. RF signals have only been transmitted from Earth for 100 years or so, and the vast majority of the energy in the last 50 years. So, only nearby civilizations (distance <= 50 LY) could know about us and be sending these signals.
    2. The Arecibo antenna is actually a volcanic caldera, and can only sees a certain band of the celestial sphere, so there could be nearby civilizations transmitting, and SETI @ Home would miss them.
    3. You can make a case that any civilzation capable of contacting us would almost certainly be far more advanced than we are. Given the way communications bandwidth is gobbled up by our relatively primitive culture, they'd probably be using all sorts of sophisticated spread-spectrum technology and a wide part of the electromagnetic spectrum that would make it very tricky for us to intercept and recognize messages not intended for us, even if we were lucky with the geometry.
    4. The SETI@Home people are real scientists, and they kow that they need rock-solid evidence if they're going to claim they found a signal. So, they are bending over backwards - as they should - to find alternative explanations when they do see something anomalous.

    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.

  • 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.

    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
  • If you don't think RC5 is worth the effort, you can always work on distributed net's Optimal Golomb Ruler project. [distributed.net] Solving an OGR does have some practical benefits related to cystallography and astronomy.
  • 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
    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.
  • I think that the distributed.net project is a proof in concept thing.

    We all know that brute force can break encyption. By doing it, we demonstrate how simple it is to do.

  • > Given the reasonable success of these systems I wonder when people are going to start exploiting this sort of system comercially.

    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.

    --

  • Do something more useful... (Score:4)

    by grytpype ( 53367 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @06:14AM (#546857) Homepage
    Try running the folding@home [stanford.edu] client instead. That project produces actual, useful scientific results about protein folding. SETI is just an inefficient search through a million billion haystacks for a needle that probably is not there.

  • Re:Do something worthwhile, folding@home (Score:5)

    by Mr. Mikey ( 17567 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @06:14AM (#546858)
    Protein folding is certainly an important problem, and worthy of CPU cycles.


    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.

  • And it has a really small memory footprint compared to SETI@home.
  • I agree that the RC5-64 project is pointless, but Optimal Golomb Rulers are supposed to have some scientific uses.
  • wow. now here is an example of someone not reading the FAQ.

    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.

  • Um... you might want to do a little research. It looks like they're recycling old blocks for a couple (IMHO) good reasons: because they have more users than blocks sometimes; and therefore can well afford to do some error-checking by recycling blocks.

    Pretty screensaver? Wasteful
    Recycling blocks? Not necessarily.

  • Beside looking for E.T.? Any research on AIDs, complex math equation, etc.?

    Thanks. :)

  • . . .would be the late Senator William Proxmire.

    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. . .

  • The problem with SETI is that most life out there isn't intelligent enough or advanced enough to broadcast anything. The window for a civilization to use broadcast methods is relatively small, if you look at earth as an example. I'm sure that point to point communications will replace broadcast within the near future (100 years), a mere instant on the cosmic scale. I would love to see distributed computing used to help the human genome project, protein folding, etc. There are much clearer benefits to doing so.

  • How about geek web page loyalty?

  • Time is time. They're not talking about flops or results received. They simply mean that people have contributed 500,000 years of time on their machines. (Actually slightly less since some setups can process multiple results simultaneously.) But if you want a real computing power measure, the total number of Floating Point Operations has been (as of their last post):

    5.97 x 10^20

    Not bad, eh?

  • i would also prefer them dumping rc5-64 project but its more or less imposible because if they dumped rc5-64, it wouldnt be good thing pr wise. what would you think if you were running dist.net client for 3 years doing rc5 cracking and d.net suddenly discontinues the project. most of users would switch to "more trustful" project because they dont want their work to be discarded.
  • As has been pointed out by many othe posters, I'm sure...

    A client filled with Eye Candy is not efficient. Hell, the Seti@home client is not efficient to begin with, and then they throw all the wiz-bang-gui on top of it. I prefer to get as _much_ out of my idle cpu cycles as possible. Considering that the largest majority of my idle cycles are when I'm away from my computer, what good is a cute little screen saver?!!
  • written like a die-hard shell user!

    :-)
  • No, one always has the right to inform others that you fear they suffer a cranio-rectal inversion. They have the reciprocal right to ingore you, or to counter that their fears for you run along the same lines.

    Any other solution is tyrrany.

  • No OS/2 client either (Score:3)

    by SpiceWare ( 3438 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @08:07AM (#546899) Homepage
    so I can't help them out either.

    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.

  • What if the nearest, most benevolent alien civilisation in the universe... talks like static? We could be bathed in signals from all directions but can't see it through all the legitimate static.

    ----
  • You hit the nail on the head. With the governments of the world providing less and less money to SETI, we the educated community need to step in and help out. I personally believe one of the things that define an advanced society is that they spend time attempting to explore and contact others. Until I can spend my spare time doing something for the space station I will be running SETI@Home on about any computer I can get my hands on.

  • shaekespeare@home:) (Score:3)

    by bockman ( 104837 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @08:12AM (#546904)
    Given the assioma that a monkey, typing randomly, has a non-null chance to type in the Amlet (or your preferred novel of your preferred author), I propose a distributed computing project to do just that (after all, world's whole computer set should reach the same intelligence of a monkey)
  • My computer has managed to process over six trillion years of abacusian processing. However, due to the large amount of entropy inherant in Windows all this math is for naught as the flawed calculations tend to cease the hardware.

    "Programming eventually leads to addition with letters"

    Capt. Ron

  • what a waste of energy (Score:3)

    by jilles ( 20976 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @06:25AM (#546908) Homepage
    There's been quite a lot of talk lately about PC and computer equipment being responsible for energy shortages. Seen in this context, the IMHO pointless and so far unsuccessful search for aliens seems a waste of energy. Computers are so much more energy efficient when suspended or turned off!
  • I run SETI at home under OS/2 and at work under NT. It's a lot more interesting running SETI at work because there I can SEE what it's doing, and therefor better comprehend what I'm helping to analyse.

    Also, if eye-candy is so unappealing, then why all the fuss in the Linux world about SKIN'ing everything?!?!

  • yeah, whatever (Score:4)

    by Primer 55 ( 263965 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @06:27AM (#546911)
    The important thing is that HALF A MILLION YEARS have collectively been spent processing the data. It is outstanding for the quantity of contribution that has been given to the project, not the quality.

    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)

    by sdo1 ( 213835 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @06:27AM (#546912) Journal
    This page [berkeley.edu] indicates that in the last 24 hrs, 2.255873e+18 Floating Point Operations were performed on this project, or 26.11 TeraFLOPs/sec.

    Wow.

    -S

  • Arecibo (facts about) (Score:5)

    by pq ( 42856 ) <rfc2324&yahoo,com> on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @06:47AM (#546913) Homepage
    The Arecibo antenna is actually a volcanic caldera, and can only sees a certain band of the celestial sphere

    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)

    by robertito ( 80580 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @06:47AM (#546914) Homepage
    Try OGR, the Optimal Golomb Ruler project [distributed.net]. Finding better OGRs is actually a lot more clueful than brute-force cracking encryption keys (we've demonstrated that can be done, enough already!) - these interesting mathematical objects actually have many practical applications in comms, radio astronomy (so you are helping to find the LGMs) and other funky areas. And they even make beautiful necklaces.... [nasa.gov]

  • Re:what a waste of energy (Score:3)

    by Junks Jerzey ( 54586 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @06:29AM (#546915)
    Agreed. If you're not using your PC for a while, just turn it off. With PCs sporting 450W power supplies these days, containing as many as five fans, and having video cards that get hot to the touch, turning the whole thing off is a good idea.
  • Microsoft should integrate the SETI@Home client into their newest Office suite. Using Office the hardware is idle most of the times. CPU cycles are used better with the SETI@Home client.

  • Re:1 thing distributed.net lacks... (Score:3)

    by cpfeifer ( 20941 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @06:48AM (#546917) Homepage
    The funny thing is the if you use the pretty seti@home sreensaver, you get severly degraded performance. With the screensaver it took my PIII-550 about 25 hours to chew through a block (running continuously). Just running the command line client (no pretty nothing), it chewed through 5-6 blocks per day. I easily blew away the competition and completed more blocks than 99% of the competition.


    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)

    by Malc ( 1751 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @06:31AM (#546918)
    I participate in Seti@Home, it seems more valuable than distributed.net's offering. However, I can see much better uses for such projects. A while ago I heard of the Casino-21 project, which is about climatic modelling. I think that this is something very useful, valuable and important to us, and I wish they would get a move on and start up. The web site of note for this project is: http://www.climate-dynamics.rl.ac.uk/ [rl.ac.uk]. At this time you can only register your interest (I think that they're still in the planning phase.) I do recommend that people register as higher numbers might increase the chances of the project happening. Presumably registering will also sign you up for future announcements, such as when they have client software to download. Although they make comparisons to SETI@Home, I think they will operate slightly differently, with work units perhaps taking more than a year (one of the things that I think makes SETI@Home successful is that people get feedback via wu completion, and get to compete).

  • "Why don't people assume *mundane* possibilities first?"

    That should be obvious--because they're mundane! We don't want to see another boring glitch--we want aliens and space ships. We want to have bragging rights of, "I was there when it all started."

    Excitement is...exciting! That's all there is to it.

  • Extra Terrestrials? (Score:5)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @05:57AM (#546923)
    > They haven't detected any Extra Terrestrials yet

    We've got some spares, if that's what you're looking for.

    --
  • Damn. After all this time you'd think we'd find at least one alien species that is talkative. Or maybe the underlying premise of SETI is flawed. Or our concept of communication is too primative for the advanced alien armada now flying towards us after seeing the final episode of M*A*S*H yesterday.

  • Meaningless statistic (Score:3)

    by patreides ( 210724 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @05:59AM (#546933)
    Measuring computing time in years doesn't mean anything; these "years" are mostly being done on slow, outdated machines like at my school, where the average time is about 26 hours (that includes some G4 cubes, Blue G3's, but mostly really old all-in-ones from 5 years ago). Some of the machines like Sun's team does one every five hours or so along with SGI, but most of the time is from us slowpokes, it doesn't track any real data analysis or progress.
  • Keep in mind that the people running Seti@Home aren't sitting in Arecibo, PR with the dish. I would imagine when the dish goes down, the primary goal of the operators is to get it working again, not to call Berkeley and say, "hey guys, the dish is broken, just disregard all the garbage data we're collecting today."
  • If we could communicate with more advanced aliens, maybe they would help us with our protein folding projects... or maybe they would come and fold a few of our proteins by bombarding the earth with huge asteroids by nudging them into the path of earth's orbit for their amusement. Either way my computer is too damn slow to do anything useful except read Slashdot.
  • After all this time you'd think we'd find at least one alien species that is talkative.

    Why? There are lots of unknowns, and lots and lots of space to look at, and lots^3 of bandwidth to look in. Seti@home has barely scratched the surface. I think it would be amazing to actually have found something this soon.


    ...phil

  • I know that if I win the lottery, I'll get paid, but you don't see me going out and buying up a bunch of tickets.

    Mike

    "I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
  • Exactly what do they mean with 500.000 years computing time? 500.000 years computing time on a 8086 is something entirely different than the same amount of computing time on an Athlon 1 GHz, so I don't really know what their statement is supposed to mean.
  • I don't understand the concept of a "close call". A "close call" would mean that an ET was out there and they almost detected it, or that they detected something and it was almost an ET.

    A broken telescope is hardly a "close call", at least in this context.

    --
  • No PC actually consumes that much power. You may have a 300 Watt or a 450 Watt Power supply but its just that ... a supply. The computer probably uses about 50-100 Watts when in an Idle mode (no cdroms or harddrives spinning) and that isn't any more of a waste than leaving a standard light bulb on all the time.

    It depends. Many PCs don't spin down their hard drives. Current processors can use 50W or more by themselves. PCs are shipping with huge power supplies for a reason. I think recent PCs are probably more in the 200W range when running a screen saver.
  • I also did the same thing as you, but for different reasons. It seems that distributed.net had simply stopped counting any work that I submitted, despite my running it on two fairly fast computers.
  • It's quite likely that I've missed something; please help me understand Distributed.net.

    A bunch of people get data from a central server, and all the computer analyze this data. In essence, what they're doing is cracking encryption.

    I'm pretty sure I'm right on that, but I still don't understand why. Are you trying to find security loopholes? I think this is the point, in which case I find the whole project rather pointless - anyone who pools together millions of computers can crack encryption eventually. As an analogy... Imagine that you are testing a new computer for Mil Spec - it has to be extremely durable. I see Distributed.net as the equivalent of stacking up 40,000 tanks and dropping them all at once from a helicopter. Oh my gosh! You found a problem with the server. But in reality, who on earth is going to do it?!

    Again, I might misunderstand - this project could be something that is done for "fun" (let's see who can crack the code quickest), or for more devious purposes... Please reply with your comments; I think I misunderstand the project.

  • Why SETI hasn't found anything yet... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Assume that an intelligent society exists somewhere in the universe other than here. Assume that this society is advanced enough to travel through space and communicate with other advanced societies. How do these highly advanced societies deal with less advanced societies like us? Simple. They don't. They have a code of ethics. They want us to evolve by ourselves and determine our own faith. In other words, we won't possibly come into contact with them until we have reached that stage.

    This guy is nuts, you're saying. But wait. What I'm saying is that the only "sane" alien society that would actually make the effort to contact us is one that wants to destroy us. And I don't think that's very likely either. You just can't advance to that stage without learning some very important lessons along the way. Lessons about war, peace, and morality. And don't forget that these "people" are completely self-sufficient. They don't work for a living like we do. They do work, of course, but only out of the desire to further their technological placement among other societies. In other words, they aren't out to destroy the earth just to confiscate our plutonium supply.

    Now, suppose there really is an alien race intending to destroy us. Why haven't they done it yet? What are they waiting for? Discovering intelligent life, for an advanced species, does not involve exploration ala Star Trek. They automate it. If they do exist, they already know we're here.

    So, what happens if there really is some form of communication floating around just waiting for us to discover it? I don't think it's likely at all. They wouldn't be that careless. They clean up after themselves. They generate no pollution, no tracks of where they've been.

    Here is another reason. Imagine what kinds of technology these aliens use to communicate, given that they are capable of interspace communication. It ain't radio. In other words, we're trying to recieve smoke signals while they're using light, or black holes, or plasma, or who knows what.

    The only way we could possibly make a discovery like that is if another society exists just like us; that is, at the same stage of technological evolution, within our range and with the same curiosity and motives as SETI.

    For the record, I do believe that intelligent alien life exists. Absolutely. But I don't believe that we're going to find them anytime soon. Not until we've earned the right to.

  • Re:What other services/researches are there? (Score:3)

    by Tsuran ( 77127 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @08:55AM (#546981)
    There is a project to try and find a vaccine for AIDS (http://www.fightaidsathome.org [fightaidsathome.org]) that works by running a specialized version of Autodock on your computer to simulate various molecules interacting with other molecules or what have you (I'm not a genetic engineer, the page is helpful).

    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. :)

  • > Given the reasonable success of these systems I wonder when people are going to start exploiting this sort of system comercially.

    there are number of companies that are going to offer for pay project. you should check out following sites:

    popular power [popularpower.com]: Research on influenza vaccination. has windows and gnu/linux clients. mac, solaris and *bsd clients about to be released soon. it has tim oreilly of o'reilly [ora.com] as board member.

    parabon [parabon.com]: Research on cancer treatment (chemotherapy). clients exist only for windows but they are going to release gnu/linux client soon. they are giving out 100$ on daily basis to random providers.

    Dcypher/Processtree [dcypher.net] they have some kind of physics project. problem is that its easily to cheat on this project. they are also giving out 100$ to random users.


    now to my conclusion. all of these projects are paying to little to warrant me donating my cpu time to them. many of them demands that you have 24/7 access to inet. this is something that is unnacaptable to large number of users in europe because we dont have flat rate, so i'll keep donating my cpu cycles to ogr project on dist.net
  • well difference between mac and gnu/linux is not as big as it might seem on first glance. for example on that list mac0s is mentioned 2 times while gnu/linux is mentioned 6 times. now if we add together all those units:
    Macos: 22714077+73=22714150
    GNU/Linux: 12672647+5929716+2269+1+1=18604642

    now difference is not longer around 8 million units but 4 millions instead. with that many units linux moves into #4.

    so linux users contribute 81% of what mac users contribute.


    lets now take a look at another huge distributed project. distributed.net has around 500 000 users, of which 50 000 are active every day. ( i wonder how many active users / day seti@home has).
    project OGR25
    MacOS

    macosX on powerPC is #14, rhapsody on powerPC is #16 and MacOS on powerPC is #4.

    gnu/linux

    linux on x86 is #2, linux on alpha is #12, linux on arm is #22, linux on MIPS is #24, linux on S390 is #30 and linux on sparc is #31.

    that means that macos has 22 054 256 gnodes while linux has 108 845 111 gnodes. mac users contribute 19% of what linux users contribute.

    this shows that doing linux client before mac client is actually smart choice by f@h.

  • Re:Because it's interesting to see (Score:3)

    by Rader ( 40041 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @07:10AM (#546986) Homepage
    Although it wastes a lot of cycles, the screen saver has 2 very important rolex. One is to get as many people to do it. One thing we've all seen from this project: It's power in numbers. Whether you use the screen saver or not doesn't make much of a difference. But having maybe 400,000 of the people join up because they thought it "looked cool", makes a BIG difference. Even if they run the screen saver and waste cycles.

    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

  • Another option, in the "pure math" category, is the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search at www.mersenne.org [mersenne.org].
  • honestly, I would rather have it spend just that much more CPU time cracking RC5 blocks than putting pretty shit on the screen.. setterm -blank 3 works great for me.

  • Why bother with distributed.net? (Score:3)

    by HEbGb ( 6544 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @06:04AM (#546998)
    I took a look at the current projects running from distributed.net, and couldn't find anything that appeared even marginally useful or interesting. Running brute-force hacks on encryption algorithms isn't much different than running a random number generator until your target value happens to appear. Both are equally useless.

    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?

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