Press Release: "SETI@home looking for more volunteers"

[Rattledagger]

January 3, 2007
UC Berkeley Press Release: SETI@home looking for more volunteers.

SETI@home looking for more volunteers

By Robert Sanders, Media Relations | 02 January 2008

BERKELEY ? The longest-running search for radio signals from alien civilizations is getting a burst of new data from an upgraded Arecibo telescope, which means the SETI@home project needs more desktop computers to help crunch the data.

Since SETI@home launched eight years ago, the project based at the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory has signed up more than 5 million interested volunteers and boasts the largest community of dedicated users of any Internet computing project: 170,000 devotees on 320,000 computers.

Yet, new and more sensitive receivers on the world's largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, and better frequency coverage are generating 500 times more data for the project than before. The SETI@home software has been upgraded to deal with this new data as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) enters a new era and offers a new opportunity for those who want to help find other civilizations in the universe.

"The next generation SETI@home is 500 times more powerful then anything anyone has done before," said project chief scientist Dan Werthimer. "That means we are 500 times more likely to find ET than with the original SETI@home."

According to project scientist Eric Korpela, the new data amounts to 300 gigabytes per day, or 100 terabytes (100,000 gigabytes) per year, about the amount of data stored in the U.S. Library of Congress. "That's why we need all the volunteers," he said. "Everyone has a chance to be part of the largest public participation science project in history."

The 1,000-foot diameter Arecibo dish, which fills a valley in Puerto Rico, is part of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center operated by Cornell University with funds from the National Science Foundation. Since 1992, Werthimer and his team have piggybacked on radio astronomy observations at Arecibo to record signals from space and analyze them for patterns that could indicate they were transmitted by an intelligent civilization.

When the team's incoming data overwhelmed its ability to analyze it, the scientists conceived a distributed computing project to harness many computers into one big supercomputer to do the analysis. Since SETI@home was launched, other distributed computing projects have arisen, from folding@home to predict the three-dimensional tangle of a protein to the newly-launched cosmology@home to model possible universes. Most are now on a platform called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), which was developed by SETI@home's director David Anderson so that the various projects could share resources.

"There are now 42 projects on BOINC, and, until now, there has been enough computing power to go around," Werthimer said.

What triggered the new flow of data was the addition of seven new receivers at Arecibo, which now allow the telescope to 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.

These improvements also prime the telescope for an improved search for intelligent signals from space.

"The multiple receivers help us weed out interference better and make us less susceptible to thinking that things terrestrial are extraterrestrial,"
Werthimer said.

Werthimer noted that, despite the fact that UC Berkeley has been analyzing radio signals from space since 1978 on various telescopes, no telltale signals from an intelligent civilization have yet been found.

"Earthlings are just getting started looking at the frequencies in the sky; we're looking only at the cosmically brightest sources, hoping we are scanning the right radio channels," he said. "The good news is, we're entering an era when we will be able to scan billions of channels. Arecibo is now optimized for this kind of search, so if there are signals out there, we or our volunteers will find them."

SETI@home has been funded by various organizations over the years, including the Planetary Society and Sun Microsystems, and continues to be supported by individual donations from its volunteers.

Further information:

SETI@home Web site

Technical News:

Furniture Shortage (Jan 03 2008)

Spreading the workunit creation over several files at once seems to be helping create a healthier mix of fast/slow workunits. However, adding a second download server seems to have confirmed a suspicion of mine (key word: "seems"): that somewhere down the pike we're being capped at 60 Mbits/sec. For a while there we had two download servers and a workunit storage server with plenty I/O capacity to spare, but still we were hitting a hard 60 Mbit ceiling outbound. Inquiries are being drafted/sent to the appropriate parties. It still could be a local problem, but we're not sure what else to try (given our current hardware).

We are in the middle of building another helpful index on the science database. Looks like Bob's magic informix incantations are working - we can keep the project running simultaneously (though the assimilators might back up a bit). It is always happier around here when work is flowing. To be safe we increased the ready-to-send queue size to one million - we have the disk space now to keep more workunits around. The only downside is that this inflates the result table in the database by approximately 5-10%, which may exercise the RAM on the BOINC database server that much more.

There is another problem Dave and I were poking at today: excessive "out of range" failures on our public web sites. Here's the deal: BOINC clients have a nice GUI which shows you icons, pictures, etc. from different projects as you select which to run on your computer. Where does it get these files? From the project's web servers. This is all well and good, but there are several (hundreds? thousands?) older clients out there making such requests but are being met with 416 "range not satisfiable" errors. Why? Because they have already downloaded the image file, but are making requests for more bytes beyond the file boundaries as if there was more to download. Obviously a bug somewhere, or a change in the way apache handles such things, but there's not much we can do about it. Even though this activity is creating bursts of heavy load on our web servers, this is a fire we're going to let burn for now.

The official press release about multi-beam is finally out. This should help on many levels (though I'll be busier making sure the servers can handle any significant load increase). I guess I'll also be shaving every morning in case there is interest from the national television news media.

I guess this is "technical" news: Our desks/chairs/furniture are mostly ancient hand-me-downs, some pieces older than I. We did get some new chair donations recently, but one of them broke - it came loose from its base, causing unsuspecting sitters to suddenly fall forward if their balance wasn't particularly keen. It's been lurking in our lab way too long, coaxing uninformed standers with tired legs to rest upon its comfortable and seemingly stable cushion base. I came to the lab this morning and that evil chair was by my desk with a note taped to it: "Matt - can you please toss this chair?" I guess enough was enough. I dragged it to the dumpster and sent it back to the dark void from whence it came.

- Matt

#____Total Work Done____Todays WD_______AWD________overtake________Team-name
01______390.811.952______687.794______553.655______impossible______SETI.USA
02______322.172.442______886.552______663.308______impossible______SETI.Germany
03______135.813.746______248.006______168.370______impossible______L'Alliance Francophone
04______115.552.136_______54.168_______61.163______impossible______BroadbandReports.com Team Starfire
05______113.436.059______188.959______146.079______impossible______BOINC Synergy
06_______97.287.759_______87.358_______50.065______impossible______Czech National Team
07_______90.894.912______106.793_______90.870______impossible______SETI@Netherlands
08_______80.697.231______150.020______121.096______impossible______The Knights Who Say Ni!
09_______42.942.455_______53.909_______46.273______impossible______Overclockers.com
10_______40.614.350______-57.307______-47.362________858 days______OcUK - Overclockers UK
11_______40.208.378_______29.015_______34.764______impossible______Team Art Bell
12_______33.575.165________5.898_______11.027______impossible______Team 2ch
13_______28.861.126_______12.436________7.434______impossible______The Planetary Society
14_______28.491.527_______38.939_______33.634______impossible______Team MacNN
15_______23.299.964_____-108.842______-85.325________273 days______BOINC.Italy
16_______12.597.816______-63.147______-45.365________278 days______Ars Technica
17__________479.177_______67.973_______48.858______impossible______Team China
18_______73.962.099______186.040______151.430______notanoption_____TeAm AnandTech
19__________-27.979_______19.617________3.137__________9 days______SETI@Taiwan
20_______-1.224.030______-56.610______-47.792______impossible______Universe Examiners
21_______-2.281.313______-45.297______-33.078______impossible______Phoenix Rising
22_______-3.540.620_______73.410_______61.519_________58 days______Team Starfire World BOINC
23______-14.437.207______-34.719______-28.841______impossible______Canada
24______-15.130.610______-70.835______-58.891______impossible______Dutch Power Cows
25______-16.886.572______-65.454______-57.362______impossible______Amateur Radio Operators
26______-17.281.316______-86.203______-71.404______impossible______PC Perspective Killer Frogs
27______-17.524.280_____-114.085______-93.852______impossible______Hewlett-Packard
28______-21.080.814______-31.462______-23.854______impossible______UK BOINC Team
29______-23.378.853______-74.065______-56.546______impossible______Team NIPPON
30______-23.673.956______-22.386______-21.643______impossible______US NAVY
31______-23.694.872_______32.798_______23.050______1.028 days______AUSTRIA - NATIONAL - TEAM
32______-23.714.050______-97.810______-79.020______impossible______Team MacAddict
33______-24.126.203______-75.395______-46.481______impossible______BOINC SETI@home RUSSIA
34______-24.617.114______-51.233______-45.557______impossible______BOINC@AUSTRALIA
35______-25.814.448______-68.590______-54.649______impossible______BOINC@Denmark
36______-26.374.606______-83.539______-67.104______impossible______Hungary
37______-26.800.177_____-125.291_____-101.828______impossible______2CPU.com
38______-27.290.051______-22.951______-28.266______impossible______U.S.Air Force
39______-27.505.458_____-141.800_____-115.346______impossible______Planet 3DNow!
40______-32.642.728_____-124.203_____-105.781______impossible______Portugal@Home
41______-33.943.854______-99.846______-84.589______impossible______SETI.hr
42______-34.592.127______-96.706______-80.783______impossible______SETI@klamm.de
43______-38.129.626_____-128.597_____-105.871______impossible______Team EDGE
44______-38.230.625_____-126.249_____-103.333______impossible______HispaSeti & BOINC
45______-38.490.391_____-120.803______-92.816______impossible______BOINC.SK
46______-39.074.409_____-163.565_____-131.335______impossible______Picard
47______-39.392.790_____-113.396______-94.032______impossible______SETI Sverige [Sweden]
48______-39.960.654_____-165.510_____-134.601______impossible______LittleWhiteDog
49______-40.948.093______-45.826______-53.873______impossible______BOINC@Poland
50______-42.951.192_____-135.677_____-109.371______impossible______BOINC UK

Appart for Anandtech's stats, it shows how much more/less than Anandtech.
Also shows based on Average Work Done how many days for Anandtech to overtake the team, or be overtaken by a team behind...


Due to the weekly outage was on Wednesday this week, there was as normal a decrease in stats all-around yesterday, and not unexpectedly followed by an increase in stats all-around to-day.

But granted, there was also a bunch of VHAR going-through the system yesterday, since this gives download-problems this likely gave an additional decrease in yesterdays production...

 

[Smoke]

Thanks for the update, RD. :beer:

 

[Markfw]

I have a question. How come they can say that seti is the largest distributing project with over 170,000 devotess, when F@H currently has 886,007 ?

 

[Alyx]

Possibly 170k active. Total user accounts is in the 650,000 range. Thats where I started when I joined the project at least, so likely even higher now.

Oh, I also feel like I should drive up to Berkeley and give them a new chair. I've got a spare and I'm only a short drive away...

 

[Rattledagger]

Originally posted by: Markfw900
I have a question. How come they can say that seti is the largest distributing project with over 170,000 devotess, when F@H currently has 886,007 ?

This is because you're trying to compare active SETI@home-users against total FAH-users there most of them stopped running FAH some years ago...


SETI@home has 5+ million registered users, FAH has 100-200 registered users (since users doesn't really register in FAH except for the so-called FAH/BOINC beta-test.)

SETI@home "classic" had close to 3.5 M users with credit, SETI/BOINC has 745285 users with credit, while FAH has 886007 different user-names with credit.

SETI@home has over 4.1M different host-id's, but since can merge doublets and delete outdated there's 1.7M hosts currently listed. FAH claims 2.7M "cpu", but this is in reality clients and without any form of merging there's likely many doublets by now...

SETI@home has around 320k active hosts, on average there's around 1.4 cpu/host meaning roughly 450k cpu's. FAH has around 255k active "cpu".


Now, I'm not sure on the time-line for calling SETI@home-user active, but it's either 1 week or 1 month, while FAH uses 50 days except for PS3 and GPU. With different time-line to call someone active and different methods to count cpu's and so on, it's not directly comparable.

 

[SETIdude]

looking for more volunteers eh?

i think they have more than they can handle at this time. i've slowly taken my computers to different projects due to the frequent server slowdowns they have been having since multibeam was introduced.

imho, they are really asking for more problems.

 

[Assimilator1]

lol ,'shaving every morning' for the press
Thanks for the update RD ,maybe now I'll remember what multi-beam is about
500 times is a massive jump in data outout!:shocked:

I agree with SETIDude on this ,aren't they already maxed out with current throughput?

Wasn't Arecibo going to be de-commisioned soon?

Good output which counters the other day

 

[petrusbroder]

Thanks for the info and stats, Rattledagger!

 

[Zim Hosein]

Thanks for the SETI@home daily stats and news updates Rattledagger! :beer:

 

[BlackMountainCow]

Originally posted by: SETIdude
looking for more volunteers eh?

i think they have more than they can handle at this time. i've slowly taken my computers to different projects due to the frequent server slowdowns they have been having since multibeam was introduced.

imho, they are really asking for more problems.

QFT

 

[Assimilator1]

QFT?

 

[BlackMountainCow]

"quoted for truth"

 

[Smoke]

Originally posted by: BlackMountainCow
"quoted for truth"

lol :laugh:

I thought you were going to say something else.












/must avoid bad language in the DC Forum due to the presence of minors/
Good job, BMC :beer:

 

[mk]

Originally posted by: Smoke

Originally posted by: BlackMountainCow
"quoted for truth"

lol :laugh:

I thought you were going to say something else.

/must avoid bad language in the DC Forum due to the presence of minors/

"quantum field theory"?

 

[SETIdude]

Originally posted by: BlackMountainCow

Originally posted by: SETIdude
looking for more volunteers eh?

i think they have more than they can handle at this time. i've slowly taken my computers to different projects due to the frequent server slowdowns they have been having since multibeam was introduced.

imho, they are really asking for more problems.

QFT

yeah you have more posts. probably consisting of mostly the same 3 letters. but check my join date. then apply your comment to yourself.

have a nice day.

 

[bryanW1995]

I run 3-4 days extra work on all my machines and never run out of units to crunch in seti.

 

[BlackMountainCow]

Originally posted by: SETIdude

Originally posted by: BlackMountainCow

Originally posted by: SETIdude
looking for more volunteers eh?

i think they have more than they can handle at this time. i've slowly taken my computers to different projects due to the frequent server slowdowns they have been having since multibeam was introduced.

imho, they are really asking for more problems.

QFT

yeah you have more posts. probably consisting of mostly the same 3 letters. but check my join date. then apply your comment to yourself.

have a nice day.

Don't know why you are using such a tone, but apparently my usage of QFT differs from yours. Mine means: I absolutely agree with what you posted (Quite Fu**ing True). No idea where yours is coming from.

:roll:

And just for info: I don't care when you joined or how much you posted already. What matters is your current post!

 

[Rattledagger]

Originally posted by: BlackMountainCow
Don't know why you are using such a tone, but apparently my usage of QFT differs from yours. Mine means: I absolutely agree with what you posted (Quite Fu**ing True). No idea where yours is coming from.

:roll:

And just for info: I don't care when you joined or how much you posted already. What matters is your current post!

Would guess most haven't the foggiest idea of that QFT means, but a search reveals one of the commonly-used meanings is basically "shut up"...

 

[BlackMountainCow]

I didn't know QFT either until somebody used it here in the DC forums - as quoted for truth.

 

[Markfw]

Originally posted by: BlackMountainCow
I didn't know QFT either until somebody used it here in the DC forums - as quoted for truth.

Exactly. Everyone here uses it for that, that I have seen.

Setidude, you need to calm down the tone, or you may get a vacation from the mods.

 

[Neurodog]

Google search.

Quote:

A phrase used on internet forums. Use it when another user makes a post which describes your opinion about something so perfectly you just have to quote them in your own post, but don't know what to say about it. Often shortened to QFT or QTF

 

[Rattledagger]

Originally posted by: Markfw900
Exactly. Everyone here uses it for that, that I have seen.

Setidude, you need to calm down the tone, or you may get a vacation from the mods.

Well, I've never seen it before, and QFT has multiple meanings there some of the meanings is decidedly negative...

Being mostly unknown and having so many opposing meanings, it's much better to write-out the meaning you're choosing, instead of using the abbrevation QFT.

But of course, in a discussion about Quantum Field Theory there it's no danger of mis-interpreting, using QFT isn't a problem.

 

[Markfw]

In your link the only references in the first page were "quoted for truth" or the "Quantum Field Theory", so I think everyone here is on the same page, except possibly for you. (no offense)

So when you see it here in the future, please assume it means "quoted for truth".

 

[GLeeM]

Originally posted by: Rattledagger
Well, I've never seen it before, and QFT has multiple meanings there some of the meanings is decidedly negative...

Thanks for the stats, Rattledagger

But the negative meanings would never be used in the Anandtech DC forum!!

So should be safe to use and know that it would be understood correctly.

 

[petrusbroder]

We could discuss for quite some time what QFT really means. That is not important.
The important thing is, that one forum member - no matter whether due to a misunderstanding or due to a different definition of the acronym - felt offended.
That feeling is - given that QFT can represent exactly opposite ideas and that some of those are very impolite - understandable.

Knowing that BlackMountainCow in this case did not mean any offense and that it takes some to provoke him, I think we all may leave this topic and agree to use the acronym QFE which may be interpreted as Quoted for Emphasis or Quoted for Exactness.

SetiDude, please be assured, that BMC, whom I know well, did not mean the negative connotation of the acronym.