Rattledagger
Elite Member
SETI@Home/BOINC news:
New Photo-albums:
Sunday at the Lab A visual update of the random computer hardware we have kicking around (04.12.2005)
SETI@Home Classic Shuts Down Ushering in the new age (15.12.2005)
Technical News:
From the forum:
Posted 10 Dec 2005 8:57:02 UTC
Posted 13 Dec 2005 7:17:43 UTC
Updated SETI@Home news:
And yet another re-write of the "classic"-news:
December 15, 2005
A story about SETI@home's transition to BOINC appears in the Nature web site.
December 15, 2005
After 6 years of operation, SETI@home Classic sent out its last workunit. We will clean up and synchronize the Classic stats with the current SETI@home project in the coming weeks. Thanks to all SETI@home Classic participants for their tremendous dedication to the project. You made SETI@home into something of lasting significance.
Read a brief history of SETI@home.
New Photo-albums:
Sunday at the Lab A visual update of the random computer hardware we have kicking around (04.12.2005)
SETI@Home Classic Shuts Down Ushering in the new age (15.12.2005)
Technical News:
December 17, 2005 - 01:00 UTC
We shut down SETI@home Classic yesterday. In reality, everything is still running - we just aren't sending out any new work, and changed the messages being issued to the old clients regarding the switch to BOINC. Luckily, as we flipped the switch all backend servers on BOINC were working perfectly.
Except that we are still in the middle of the master database merge. It's about 25% done at this point. Because of this merge we have about one million "deferred" workunits that can't be assimilated just yet (these don't show up on the "waiting for assimilation" queue). These are workunits that entered the queue during the first few days of the merge, but then we switched databases around (see below) so they are now requiring some database cleanup before assimilating.
We only have one terabyte of workunit storage, and these deferred workunits are taking up about 350GB. So with the continuing influx of new participants (and increasing demand for workunits) our workunit storage device almost filled up. Last time this happened we started sending out 0-length workunits to the clients, which caused a bit of an ugly but eventually harmless headache. We stopped the splitters for a while today so that the assimilators/deleters could catch up a bit and make some space for new work.
To clear up more space, we are moving the deferred workunits off to another device. This is happening at the rate we are splitting new work at this point, so we shouldn't fill up the workunit disks any time soon (we are at about 98% full now - and dropping).
From the forum:
Posted 10 Dec 2005 8:57:02 UTC
I keep seeing in these forum threads various valid complaints. Here are some reasons off the top of my head that SETI@home Classic is shutting down, and other facts of life that may very well address your particular concern:
1. SETI@home Classic has no funding at this point. Hasn't had it for years now. Costs about $500,000/year at a minimum to run the thing. SETI@home as we know it now is coasting on fumes until (hopefully) more funding somehow appears. BOINC has funding. Therefore, putting SETI@home on BOINC has given it at least some life in the past two years, and is really the only chance for any kind of future.
2. SETI@home Classic was supposed to be a 3 or 4 year project to begin with. So it's well past it's proposed lifespan with no money added to keep it going.
3. The science in SETI@home Classic is basically over. We collected more than enough data with the current instrument. We have a new data recorder close to finished and a new BOINC client will be in the works to analyze this data. To keep Classic going would mean compiling a new Classic client to analyze this data. It's been a loooong time since a new Classic client has been built. The code is stale, and the build machines are ancient and painful to use (if they even exist anymore).
4. The SETI@home Classic backend is a tangled mess. There have been many problems over the years, most of which were invisible to the participants. None of these problems were fatal to the project or its science, but have resulted in an obnoxious web of ridiculous dependencies, confusing configurations, and unweildy databases. I am practically drooling dreaming of day when we get to turn all that stuff off and be done with it already. The BOINC backend is sooooo much easier to deal with.
5. The current crises are just par for the course in the history of our SETI project and public resource computing. Things break, deep breaths are taken, and they get fixed eventually. This isn't good for making our participants happy of course, but we do our best with what we got and so far our user base has stuck with us through the painful periods (thank you!!!).
6. BOINC was written so you can connect to other projects when there are server issues with a specific project. This is a good thing. SETI@home Classic has no such ability.
7. BOINC credit, while not perfect (though we're working on that), is much more fair in that it represents actual work done, and is valid between projects which do all kinds of different work. There is no way to translate Classic credit to BOINC credit, and so this will never happen. Classic credits will be noted in a separate field in a user profile (and will be eventually sync'ed up again after Classic shuts down).
8. Though I don't have any accurate numbers to back this up, I personally feel that so far SETI@home/BOINC has had more uptime on average than Classic. We had science database crashes every week at times back in the day, several whole weeks when we were down for database recovery or because somebody stole a cable, network bandwidth issues that brought us down for months. And these were just the public-facing downtime events (among but a few).
9. There is no tech support on staff. I end up with dozens of e-mails a day from people who figured out how to reach me. If I dealt with all these, that would occupy about 15-20% of my time. I don't have this time and neither does anybody else around here. Many of these e-mails go unaswered. Sad but true, and I personally find this painful but part of the big picture.
10. Yes, we can do better in the PR department. See #9 above. Don't have the staff or the money to add the staff. And it's not so easy to add news items to the page. I can't be bothered to go into detail why. I leave this as an exercise for the reader to figure out why.
11. The staff is small. Me and Jeff are continually up to our necks dealing with everything. We've both been here working on SETI long before SETI@home came around, so we both are well versed in every aspect of the "big picture" around here. Bob, the main database guy, actually only works half time. Court is busy dealing with various long term network/systems projects that Jeff and I can't handle since we're diagnosing, debugging, programming, or maybe actually getting science done. David and Rom (and other various programmers) strictly work on BOINC code. Eric works overtime on other non-SETI projects when he's not building the next SETI@home client. Dan, the project director, is spending a lot of time building spectrometers for other projects because that's where the money is. Outside of current academics (Kevin and Josh) working on other applications of SETI data, and students helping Dan build hardware that's it here at the lab. No administrative staff, no tech writers. When it comes time to fill out a new grant proposal, we all drop everything and work on that, for example.
12. If anybody complains elsewhere about any of the above, please be kind and point them to this post. People have the right to be upset with us since they are kindly donating their resources to us. However, there is a lot of misinformation or misunderstanding about this project and I hope I cleared some of it up.
Now I'm off to bed. Going to LA tomorrow. Be back Sunday night.
- Matt
Posted 13 Dec 2005 7:17:43 UTC
Some random clarifications:
I. The faulty exponential backoff is a well known problem and is being worked on, especially in light of last week's issues.
II. Clarification about funding: There is some money for SETI@home hardware/data recording, mostly because this technology can be used (and is used) for various non-SETI projects. But there is no money for SETI@home Classic data analysis or day-to-day operations.
III. Regarding our "poor planning," some days around here are like working on the bridge of the Enterprise during the last ten minutes of any given episode where the ship is under attack or about to self destruct and there's the stock tension music and everything. It's not exactly fun. There is, on average, about 1.5 people in the lab at any given time. If something breaks, you don't think, "Hmm. Let me load up Xfig and draw a diagram then call for a 2 o'clock meeting where we can discuss this matter." It's more like: "Hmm. Every second we're pissing off 10 people. What's the quickest way I can fix this damn thing so I can get back to writing my grant proposal."
IV. We wrote about the outages less and less in the old SETI@home Classic tech news as time wore on. Same thing every week. Online cience database crashed. Server down for 12-24 hours. Everything's back up now. Should have wrote a script that put such a message up on the front page every five days or so. I don't know if anybody's noticed but the Classic servers have already crashed three times already this month. Had to kick 'em back to life every time. In fact, I think they're dropping connections right now...
- Matt
Updated SETI@Home news:
December 23, 2005
Yesterday we stopped accepting results for SETI@home Classic. The Classic project stats are now frozen.
And yet another re-write of the "classic"-news:
On December 15, 2005, after 6 years of operation, Classic SETI@home sent out its last workunit. On December 22, we stopped receiving results. The current SETI@home project is up and running. Please join us! The new software uses the BOINC distributed computing platform, which enables your computer to work on other scientific endeavors like SETI@home if you wish. We could all use your CPU cycles! It's easy to switch over - just follow the instructions on the new SETI@home web site. We hope to see everyone there!
After the last result is received, the stats for this project will be frozen but will continue to be available on the web. It may take several weeks to clean everything up and syncronize the classic stats with the current SETI@home project.
Thanks to all original SETI@home participants for their tremendous dedication to the project. You made SETI@home into something of lasting significance.
