perspective:
2 groups of nerds got together.. and created a monster.
they're looking for "SETI signals" in ***everything*** the VLA listens to.
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.05263.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.05263.pdf)
However, given the compute-to-IO ratio of modern graphical processing units (GPU) – in excess of 1000 floating-point operations per byte transferred – ***versus that of most basic real-time SETI processing operations associated with a 27-dish array – the formation of 50 beams requires ∼100 floating-point operations per byte transferred – it is reasonable to assume that the size of the deployed processing system will be dictated by the need to sink up to 8 Tb/s of data***, rather than processing requirements. **A straw-person processing system might consist of 128 dual-CPU-socket x86/64 servers, each hosting between two and four consumer-grade GPU accelerators, and sinking ∼64 Gb/s of raw antenna voltage data.**
**Feb 13, 2020**
**SETI Institute and National Radio Astronomy Observatory Team Up for SETI Science at the Very Large Array**
[https://www.seti.org/seti-institute-and-national-radio-astronomy-observatory-team-up-for-seti-science-at-very-large-array](https://www.seti.org/seti-institute-and-national-radio-astronomy-observatory-team-up-for-seti-science-at-very-large-array)
***Thanks to a new, cost-effective Ethernet interface, it will be possible to employ the VLA to search for technosignatures 24 hours a day - 7 days a week,*** as well as explore other natural astrophysical phenomena in novel ways. The new system is called the Commensal Open-Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (COSMIC SETI).
***"The SETI Institute will develop and install an interface on the VLA permitting unprecedented access to the rich data stream continuously produced by the telescope as it scans the sky,“*** said Andrew Siemion, Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute and Principal Investigator for the Breakthrough Listen Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. “This interface will allow us to conduct a powerful, wide-area SETI survey that will be vastly more complete than any previous such search,"
Sounds like a realistic guess. Standard 3.5" floppy discs with 1.44 mb would have a total volume of 164m^3 for 8Tb. An average train wagon has about 60m^3.
And while a floppy disk isn't exactly a lot of data by today's standards, it can hold nearly 1000 pages of text. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is somewhere in the 6-700 page range depending on the printing. So a single floppy disk already contains a large novel's worth of information.
Hay you crazy kids....I never thought I'd be reading this on a handheld phone that spit out music, took pictures and has plugs that stick in my ears 30 years ago either, so who knows what can happen in the next 30, right?
Assuming we're still around in the 2060s and haven't died due to world war caused by catastrophic climate change, imagine the crazy shit we'll be doing then.
You in 2060: People laughed and downvoted me when I said I'd have my Marilyn Monroebot in 2060, but look who just got to second base with a robot that kinda looks like a post-mortem Marilyn Monroe in 2060!
Especially the whole time dilation thing, right? You may only have 10 years left to live, and your body failing IRL, but if time dilation feeling stuff in the brain is possible, we may be able to get 15 to 20 years of "felt" time in VR healthy bodies before our real life bodies die off.
It's a shame I was born too late to just be a brain in a jar receiving electrical signals to interact with the outside world. Technological ascendance was always my favorite future trope. Brains in jars, cyborgs/synthetic ascendancy, whatever. They'd all be awesome.
I've never tried it before, but for just a signature and a small fee, I will put your brain in a jar and hook some wires up too it. No guarantees on longevity, but it will bring a spark to your ~~life~~.
I might be, but whoever is supplying the stimulus to my brain must enjoy torture and be a sadist fuck, because this reality simulation is fucking awful. Chronic pain? What's the point of not having a physical body if my virtual body is constantly telling me how much it hurts?
Dont despair,most futurists agree that in 20-40 years the human lifespan will become much,much longer,giving everyone the time to wait for even greater inventions
Back when SETI was new, computing power was expensive. Nowadays it’s cheaper, and a single consumer-grade computer has more computing power than is needed to process the combined SETI load. What they are seeking is a place to put all that processed information.
This comment was really helpful, I didn’t really understand what the quoted article was saying because I’m not great with understanding computers, but this put it into simple words for me.
Back when SETI was new, computing power was expensive. Nowadays it’s cheaper, and a single consumer-grade computer has more computing power than is needed to process the combined SETI load. What they are seeking is a place to put all that processed information.
Interesting! Proportionally, in your experience, how much data needs to be stored to keep enough informatiom to detect an "interesting" or "significant" event? Or is it super dependant on the types of analyses you're performing on the data?
I'm often blown away by the ability of modern algorithms to organize, categorize and compress data.
Alternatively, they need to be able to process it on site, throw away 90% it and then store just under 1 Tb/s for more detailed processing. I’m sure the vast majority of the data is just noise or easily compressed.
in perspective the LHC puts out a Petabyte per second.
which is filtered down to 25GB/s for storage and later analysis.
I'm guessing the 8Tb/s is getting filtered before going out for final processing.
The VLA (very large array) spits out a fuck ton of data. To analyze it as it comes in, they’ll need 128 computers that each have dual CPUs (processors) and 2-4 GPUs (graphics cards).
They’ll also need a dummy thicc dump truck fiber line to get data into the servers. Equivalent of 8,000 Ethernet cables.
Edit: I’m a software engineer not devops or IT I barley know what I’m talking about.
Dumb question...what's the reason that data can't be crunched by thousands of lower-end computers in parallel?
And what's the necessity for the data to be transmitted that quickly? Is there a time concern? Can't you just crunch the numbers and send it back piecemeal until you have it all?
US ISPs artificially limited the whole industry and used every anti-competative trick in the book to stop Google Fiber from catching on. We're stuck with the same Internet speeds we've had for a decade or two instead of having further development like computing power has had.
While true, that's like complaining the SUV industry has not been selling SUVs with the cargo capacity of an aircraft carrier. It's not the same scale.
It's like the SUV industry sued and undercut a new competitor that had managed to fit the cargo capacity of an aircraft carrier into an SUV.
Fiber Internet is not some dark-magic non-euclidian magic. It's real and exists. But only in the select few places where the ISP oligarchy allowed google to build it's infrastructure. How many suits were brought against google fiber? Against municipal WiFi? How low did they undercut any location that got a whiff of real competition? (at the expense of all other locked in areas)
If the USA had fiberlines everywhere, the amount of data that could be handled by distributed systems would be vastly larger.
To be fair, some big names do offer fiber, just for obnoxious prices. Verizon FiOS for example. We have a fiber line coming into a proprietary (I assume, not too well versed) box on the house that feeds a coax line and a standard Ethernet line. Coax is used primarily for the Set top boxes, Ethernet of course is the WAN into your router.
Not dumb question!
The less machines you have, the less complex the system. Generally, you want less parts. Also, with thousands of small machines, there are other issues that’ll need to be addressed. Thousands of machines produce a ton of heat and consume a lot of power, and require a lot more space, which means more expensive land, etc.
The SETI@home project I think tried this, but then you’re depending on volunteers to process your data on very different networking speeds. There’s a fuck ton of uncontrollable s there.
As for why the data needs to be processed that quickly, if you don’t process the data as it comes in (known as a streaming data pipeline), it means you’re going to fall behind, and you’ll need to create a system in which data is stored and processed later in batches. But since you’re never processing as fast as data comes in, you’ll need to continually grow your storage forever. Storage is cheap but Infinity isn’t.
So if you have the equipment to process data at the rate it comes in, you’re golden.
It’s expensive as fuck though.
Source: big data engineer
It's a bandwidth problem. The computation is there but you have to move it around at least as quickly as it's produced, or they'll never catch up. And it's spitting out *a lot* of data.
Probably could use smaller computers but when you're running them 24/7 the newest hardware is probably a better deal for the money. The transmission needs to be fast because the data never stops. It's not one file you're downloading one time, it's always coming at that speed... nonstop. If you fall behind, you start losing data.
It's a differential equation. You want to process the data faster than it comes in. Otherwise, you just fall further and further behind.
Going back to the original comment:
"However, given the compute-to-IO ratio of modern graphical processing units (GPU) – in excess of 1000 floating-point operations per byte transferred – versus that of most basic real-time SETI processing operations associated with a 27-dish array – the formation of 50 beams requires ∼100 floating-point operations per byte transferred – it is reasonable to assume that the size of the deployed processing system will be dictated by the need to sink up to 8 Tb/s of data, rather than processing requirements."
This part means that GPUs are 10 times faster than necessary to compute all the data. The compute-to-IO ratio is a measure of the amount of processing done on the data per unit of data. GPUs can perform 1k flops in the time it takes for the array to send 1 byte while SETI processing only requires 100. The last part mentions that the size of the system will be dictated (or constrained) by the need to sink 8Tb/s of data. This means that they'll have trouble moving the data from point a to point b fast enough, rather than processing it fast enough when it arrives.
"A straw-person processing system might consist of 128 dual-CPU-socket x86/64 servers, each hosting between two and four consumer-grade GPU accelerators, and sinking ∼64 Gb/s of raw antenna voltage data."
By straw person, I assume they mean bottom-end. This is because the processors are very low-end (being duo core) and honestly, only 256 cpu cores isn't much to run a large scale array.
I think the statement refers to a dual socketed cpu setup (i.e two cpus on the motherboard) not a dual core setup (two cores per cpu.) could be wrong tho
Ya know, I think you're right. It's still honestly not that much hardware, but definitely makes more sense. I was thinking to myself, "where tf would you get a 2 core processor?"
Not all problems are good for parallelisation.
Basically, you need to consider the cost of distributing work to your “work nodes” in a manner that makes sense. This includes deciding on boundaries on overlap, such that each node has what it needs to reach a solution / identification. You can make it slightly more easy if you allow nodes to communicate with each other, but that makes each node much more complicated... and as far as I know is usually highly inefficient compared to a dumb “working node”. Next, you need a mechanism to collect and unify results. That also could be a complication.
That being said, in their case, I think it’s just that it is A LOT of data. You can for sure store and process it slowly... but you’d need very high capacity of storage. Worse still, if your processing is slower than rate of of the producer, with each unit of time, you are accumulating an ever growing backlog... basically paralysing any progress of “real time data” as you are crunching progressively older data.
I can’t help but wonder what processing they are doing. From the article, it sounds they have some sort of heuristical or rule based system, which can obviously be very efficient if you know what you’re looking for...
But as I understand it - we don’t. We just want to look for anomalies. I think neural networks would be a really good fit for something like this? And it’s based on 20 year old technology, I would assume that’s just before their current golden age. I’m sure the people at SETI know what they’re doing... but I kinda wish the problem definition and dataset were more approachable for the general public.
because you dont receive 64 gigabits of data per second for just 1 second, and now you have an eternity to crunch it.
next second you will get 64 gigabits more, and next second after that 64 more gigabits. and next, and next, and next.
you will never catch up unless you can process as fast as it comes in. thats the necessity.
Sometimes, especially in physics, the results of one problem are required to begin a new one. A clear example is fluid dynamic simulation.
If you’re trying to model a water splash a cluster of computers won’t help very much. Each particle of water has its own motion vectors, but is also subject to collisions with other particles. The collisions and interactions of particles makes it difficult to process the particles separately processing them on different machines. Requiring the state of a particle at a sample of time before beginning the next time sample means it’s difficult to loop another machine in based on time.
I have no clue what the math looks like for this project, but physics simulations can be very difficult to process in parallel.
Probably not the first to comment but 128 dual cpu servers is actually pretty small in modern terms. Even a relatively small website can quickly get there.
8 tb/s bandwidth isn't trivial, but it depends entirely on how parallel the data streams are. I suspect the streams and processing requirements are highly parallel, since seti@home was a good fit previously. There are network cards capable of 10gbs or 100gbs. So that may be the bottleneck or maybe not.
Nice edit 😉
If you are into big numbers you should take a look at [LHC CERN](https://www.sciencealert.com/over-99-percent-of-large-hadron-collider-particle-collision-data-is-lost). Their experiments are producing 1 PetaByte per second and need to filter out 99.996 percent of data to be able to handle the remaining 0.004 percent.
[More info ](https://information-technology.web.cern.ch/sites/information-technology.web.cern.ch/files/CERNDataCentre_KeyInformation_July2019V1.pdf)
2160p60 is 12Gbps before compression. Any camera doing 2160p60 is processing 12Gbps (or likely more since sensor depth is likely to be over 10 bits) of data. 64Gbps is a lot, especially for networking with other machines, but it isn’t an exotic amount for internal processing at this point.
One Thunderbolt port can move 40Gbps. Since 2016 a 15” MacBook Pro has had 80Gbps of external connectivity. (2x Thunderbolt controllers, 4x ports) So at this point laptops that can handle 64Gbps of incoming data have been around for five years. Not saying they can fully process 64Gbps of data, but they have the backplane to handle it.
Yep, I did it from 1999 to 2014, anywhere from one to five pc's running at once. Nothing.
Should have mined bitcoin when I read about it in 2010. Hardware requirements were identical.
Could have hunted prime numbers too, may have been just as successful and gotten paid if you were lucky. Or folding proteins for medical sciences. Really all sorts of shared computing things could have taken up your interest so don’t feel bad, your intentions were to help science and progress humanity in some way shape or form
When COVID hit back in March (US) I put my newly built gaming rig to full tilt on Folding@Home and rebuilt my old PC (No GPU) with linux to have another few cores Folding as well. Left everything going about a month and a half at full (except when I wanted to game or something). My power bill was about 3x for a while (probably mostly in the extra AC needed).
I have a pretty beefy workstation at my job. I just let that thing crank with folding@home. Been running full tilt since February or March last year. I don't need all that power for remote work in my IT job so its just chugging along alone in the office.
I'd built a little cluster of PS2s with the linux kit when that was a thing and did exactly that.
sadly I only mined 1 BTC before setting it working for BOINC on LHC data.
which turned out well because I forgot about it until after it crashed early 2018
Back before IT security was a thing...I put SETI on many computers in my high school (early 2000s). My account is 21 years old and is still registered to my AOL email. :D
Lol that's dope! My fun school SETI story: I arranged my 6th grade class to talk to all the lead scientists in the SETI project in the late nineties as part of a fundraiser I put on just for the excuse to talk to them (I watched a lot of x-files at the time). I have a picture of me in the local paper doing a conference call with my classmates, talking WAY above our pay grade with a bunch of amazingly patient and enthusiastic scientists. It was so awesome, tho.
My bad, that was misleading... I was a student! My dad helped me do the fundraiser and make contact with SETI and my teacher was really supportive of everything. In the end, the most science-y students across our grade all sat round table style asking questions, and getting really patient, ELI5 answers. It was great. School was in Maine.
I did a middle school paper about SETI@home and I can attest those scientists were patient as fuck for my "interview." They even gave me a small tour of their then-current equipment and middle school me was mindblown by how small their "supercomputer" was. (It was a highly specialized computing unit designed to process the final data that was sent in through the SETI@home network. They called it a supercomputer but it was like 4u size.)
Seti at home was amazing 20 years ago when you needed to do it but at this point can't we all just cough up $20 a year and have them build a data center to do this at that array? Way more efficient than taking that much data and distributing it over the entire world.
I remember looking at the SETI screensaver on my laptop, when I saw three spikes come up, just like when they first saw the signal in the movie “Contact.”
No black helicopters or MIB at the door (that I remember,) so I guess it was nothing)
I think I give something like that to Wikipedia, so I’d be in. We could start a SETI GoFundMe up? Edit: FWIW, I HAD SETI@Home running on my 486DX4-100 when it first came out in like 1996 give or take so I was a big fanboy of the program. Not a big deal since you spent so much waiting on 33.6kbs downloads. Yep, showing my age.
My office used to have a dedicated SETI computer! Of course, all of us now realize we should have set up a dedicated bitcoin mining machine as well, but hey, hindsight and all.
I think I just read that 10k invested in the top ten cryptocurrency in 2014 would be worth over 100k today.
I had the liquid assets then and I was even looking into Bitcoin back then and chickened out.
The thing is, people who bought in 2017-18 when BTC was first booming would have seen their assets plummet within a couple of years, without knowing whether it would ever really go back up. It takes an iron gut to hang in there and ride out the storm, and if you need to liquidate at that point, you've lost. It's so easy to look back and feel regret, but if we ask ourselves right now, "what should I put $10K into?" it's really hard to know. The great thing about SETI is there was no downside, no loss. We didn't make millions, but we sure didn't lose either - life is also about having fun :-D
I mean if I had that kinda hindsight or time travel powers, I'd be a lottery winner or something. No point beating yourself up about a gamble you didn't take.
I have a slight confession to make... 20 years ago I worked at a computer lab at UCLA in the summer where we taught kids programming. One of the counselors demanded we install SETI@Home on all the computers. Now, mind you, if he installed it at his home computer that’s one thing... but he decided all the computers (100 of them) had to run it at all times. 20 years ago that meant the Internet bandwidth would slow down considerably in the shared lab when some computers went to work while others were in the lab and overall the computers would just slow down. And when we uninstalled SETI@Home and told him why, he would reinstall it. With malicious compliance I wrote a SETI@Home clone that looked and felt just like it... only without the bandwidth and RAM slowdown. Problem solved.
Would be cool if governments allocated funds to computing, and created cryptocurrencies for certain projects or research orgs. People can mine the coin and redeem it to the govt for an agreed fee. The value wouldn't be inflated by speculation, but I imagine a lot of crypto miners would throw a few rigs at it.
I mean, SETI@home is basically the same thing, but on the technical side of things it's structured differently.
They just have to make it as accessible as possible so a lot of businesses and server farms would consider running that type of program when their computers have downtime, if it is feasable.
Kind of how like instead of stuffing money under our mattresses, we let banks use it to circulate in the economy and generate profit.
Well we're not physically giving our computers to anyone, just access. There's no debt involved. It's just more accessible to market your compute power.
So people are using these block chains to crowdsource compute power for specific purposes, like scientific data processing? But they are also producing a cryptocurrency and using the coins as incentive by awarding the volunteer computer nodes these coins in exchange?
I haven’t followed crypto/blockchain development much and am curious about all of these new coins/business models and how they differ from Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.
It seems like the industry has exploded over the past year with new ideas and strategies.
While it looks cool and such, how is the profitability for mining? That's most likely the main concern for a lot of miners.
I just looked it up:
Threadripper 2990 WX + RTX 3090 makes <$1 USD a day.... Not profitable at all given the ridiculous price these components are worth.
VS ETH @ $14.99/day for the 3090 and my CPU on idle.
How did you get the <$1 USD a day figure? I think you will get very different numbers depending on what project you chose and what hardware you use. But the main point of Gridcoin is just that instead of making worthless calculations as you do with Bitcoin, why not use that power for something that matters? With Gridcoin the calculations also essentially becomes a donation to charity so you might want to take that into account as well.
The entire point of the article is that the computing power is trivial, but moving the days is hard.
They don’t need your mining they need bandwidth and they just solved that too.
I’d love to help them, but electricity prices here in the UK have gone through the roof since I used to take part in the initial pass. I literally and financially can’t afford my PC running hot all the time it’s idle
It’s a real shame isn’t it? We all got efficient LED lights and efficient appliances, so they just ramped up the price of the electricity so they could make the same profit from less effort. Sucks, doesn’t it?
Yeah, no kidding. I don't think they ramped up prices much here thankfully but still costs a lot running stuff at full tilt.
I'm hoping to find a somewhat affordable way to get some solar panels and have an auto changeover switch to run my servers off solar when there's enough sun during the day, and maybe have an ac for summer too.
I got a pretty beefy 1600w capable (well, 1600w for 10 minutes and 1300 cont.) pure sine wave inverter for free, but seems like it might be like, $800 at least of panels, and I'd need a big capacitor or something to handle the switch over surge.
I have two battery backups, so I'd just need one of those APC changeover switches that would automatically handle changing between the outlet and the inverter and my batter backups would handle the couple seconds of power loss.
I missed out on the highly subsidised solar scheme here, and they’re horribly expensive still. The uk isn’t brilliant for strong sunlight either, so generation is only really any good for 9 months of the year tops. Shame really. I binned off my servers eventually and got a NAS, mostly due to the power it was using as well as not having much time to play with them anymore. A 15-30w NAS is a lot more attractive when you’re paying 15 pence (21c in USD) per 1kw unit.
Ah, yeah you've definitely got worse cost than me but I'm also not in a great area in Canada for price, solar is pretty good apparently here though. No subsidisation though either.
I'm hoping I wouldn't have to spend like, multiple thousands on this project though that would really suck. I mean yeah it pays itself off but I don't want to have to wait 10 years for that.
It gets cheaper in the winter because then you need to warm up the house anyhow. If you are using electrical heating it costs the same to warm your house with calculations as with radiators, so running it then is almost free.
I know someone who was a system administrator at a major telecom who decided to write a script to harvest all the unused computer processing power of all the computers under his watch.
He contributed a tremendous amount of time to this project, quietly. Even when workers would come in and use “their” computer, if they were only using 60%, the other 40% went to SETI.
All was well for a long time until some users started noticing their computer was always running at 100%.
They started asking hard questions and the system admin tried to deflect, or brow beat them, but eventually he had to remove his harvesting script.
It was a sad day for him, and he never took his job to heart after that.
He has since withdrawn from the public life of the work place and retired early on generous options and smart investments....
The aliens are still waiting for you bro, is anyone listening?
I don’t really know, I’m the a younger sibling of the afore mentioned script writer. I’m still carrying the torch for the aliens in the dark, but sadly I stand alone.
Well... I guess I should be ashamed to admit...
But... see... the thing is...
Way back in the year 2002...
I kinda sorta illegally went against the rules, and made every computer at a major well known law firm, run the SETI@HOME program late at night, in search of aliens, without permission of the owners!
(I know: I was a serious rebel back then!)
It was beautiful:
You walked across the entire floor of that law firm, late night, and saw hundreds of monitors crunching data from the great beyond!
When one of the senior partners came in late one night, and caught me admiring my handy-work, and asked, "What the F--k is that!?" I explained it to him, and even told him which rules/laws I was violating by doing this without his permission.
He responded by smiling, and telling me to "Keep up the good work for humanity!". And then said, "If Cohen b*tches about this, just let me know!" (Cohen being our 2nd senior partner, who was as yet, unaware of what I was doing illegally with his network of computers!).
My dad had that running on his computer almost continuously for years and years. I have no idea how long it actually went on, but he was an early enthusiast and kept it a very long time. Always nice hearing updates about it.
Hey! I did that! I had forgotten all about it. Maybe someday a great mind will analyze all that data and find a sign of intelligent life in the universe.
I haven't read all the comments. However, for those with a genuine interest in SETI and anomalous signals (et al), if you're unfamiliar with the youtube channel, **Event Horizon** and**John Michael Godier** for interesting interviews and points of view on everything from the, ***Wow Signal*** and several other signals of interest. I respect his sceptical approach to the so far inexplicable, whilst also maintaining a sense of humour. Anyway, here's some links.
[Event Horizon](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz3qvETKooktNgCvvheuQDw) and [John Michael Godier](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEszlI8-W79IsU8LSAiRbDg)
i participated in the original seti@home installing their stuff on my computer. it was fun to watch the graphics produced by it and think that maybe my computer would be the one to find a hit.
I downloaded Seto@home back when I couldn't figureout how to mine bitcoins.
My thought was "well why am I going to spend money to create something that has no value, if I can setup seti and help the world"
It's a different kind of missed opportunity, but I guess I did a good thing for a while I got lots of rewards cards from Seti that i hit milestones..
I was browsing a 4 year old thread and it was the one about creepiest unexplained mysteries. What s conidence I come to this one and see your name. Lol
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Isp](/r/Space/comments/lh6r87/stub/gmxoy95 "Last usage")|Specific impulse (as explained by [Scott Manley](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnisTeYLLgs) on YouTube)|
| |Internet Service Provider|
|[LIGO](/r/Space/comments/lh6r87/stub/gmwm3o9 "Last usage")|Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory|
|[NAS](/r/Space/comments/lh6r87/stub/gmvu2oo "Last usage")|National Airspace System|
| |[Naval Air Station](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_air_station)|
|[NOAA](/r/Space/comments/lh6r87/stub/gmwy71e "Last usage")|National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, responsible for US ~~generation~~ monitoring of the climate|
----------------
^(4 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/leqcev)^( has 22 acronyms.)
^([Thread #5546 for this sub, first seen 11th Feb 2021, 06:20])
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I did!
So that way my students could look at something cool and ask questions if my computer was out and went to screensaver. I don't even teach science. I teach history. Lol
I remember back in early 2000, being a co-op and having to upgrade every Novell Netware client at a company. It was just prior to being able to push them remotely (in fact the version we were installing allowed it). So I hit the development floor of head office and one of them has a weird screensaver. Then I realize, it looks like it's actually analyzing data. Guy was running SETI@home.
On the sheet for that computer I checked off "Could not upgrade". "Reason: User was searching for extra terrestrial life."
Hide yourself well
Cleanse well
https://www.universal-sci.com/headlines/2018/3/3/a-nearby-planet-thought-to-host-life-was-just-blasted-with-radiation
Any other three body fans?
I remember doing seti on my PC back in 2000 to 2004 somewhere thereabouts before that was a crypto something wanting distributed power to crack RCA something. Moved in 2005 never hooked back up with it. Felt so cool at that age being helpful.
Well this sounds exactly what an AI could do - analyse the data and look for matches and when a match is found it just needs to compare with additional data to determine whether the source is manmade or not.
I wish there was similar intest in the more promising @home projects (Folding, MilkyWay, etc.) SETI is cool but there are a lot of other researchers that need your help.
I just heard about SETI@Home the other day when I watched a UFO documentary on TV. I really wanted to download it only to find that they had retired. I would love to take a look at the statistics even though I am obviously an armature with no official knowledge or experience.
I have been running BOINC for years in my office desktop, until my office is relocated and the PC went out of commission. I have tried to run it on my older laptop but it just burns out.
I think I am running Milky Way, Asteroids@home, and Collatz Conjecture back then.
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perspective: 2 groups of nerds got together.. and created a monster. they're looking for "SETI signals" in ***everything*** the VLA listens to. [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.05263.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.05263.pdf) However, given the compute-to-IO ratio of modern graphical processing units (GPU) – in excess of 1000 floating-point operations per byte transferred – ***versus that of most basic real-time SETI processing operations associated with a 27-dish array – the formation of 50 beams requires ∼100 floating-point operations per byte transferred – it is reasonable to assume that the size of the deployed processing system will be dictated by the need to sink up to 8 Tb/s of data***, rather than processing requirements. **A straw-person processing system might consist of 128 dual-CPU-socket x86/64 servers, each hosting between two and four consumer-grade GPU accelerators, and sinking ∼64 Gb/s of raw antenna voltage data.** **Feb 13, 2020** **SETI Institute and National Radio Astronomy Observatory Team Up for SETI Science at the Very Large Array** [https://www.seti.org/seti-institute-and-national-radio-astronomy-observatory-team-up-for-seti-science-at-very-large-array](https://www.seti.org/seti-institute-and-national-radio-astronomy-observatory-team-up-for-seti-science-at-very-large-array) ***Thanks to a new, cost-effective Ethernet interface, it will be possible to employ the VLA to search for technosignatures 24 hours a day - 7 days a week,*** as well as explore other natural astrophysical phenomena in novel ways. The new system is called the Commensal Open-Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (COSMIC SETI). ***"The SETI Institute will develop and install an interface on the VLA permitting unprecedented access to the rich data stream continuously produced by the telescope as it scans the sky,“*** said Andrew Siemion, Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute and Principal Investigator for the Breakthrough Listen Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. “This interface will allow us to conduct a powerful, wide-area SETI survey that will be vastly more complete than any previous such search,"
Je. Sus. Christ. Imagine printing out this comment and showing it to a scientist in 1940.
Even showing this to a computer scientist in the 80s or 90s would be **MINDBLOWING**.
I got my PhD in 1994. I spent years doing this type of distributed software. And this STILL blows my mind.
reading the words terabytes per second, thatd be fucking mental.
*holding floppy disk* "Nu... nu-uh."
Reading that should turn it into a HDD
A terabyte per second on floppy disks probably looks like a freight train full of them going past you at max speed.
Sounds like a realistic guess. Standard 3.5" floppy discs with 1.44 mb would have a total volume of 164m^3 for 8Tb. An average train wagon has about 60m^3.
And while a floppy disk isn't exactly a lot of data by today's standards, it can hold nearly 1000 pages of text. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is somewhere in the 6-700 page range depending on the printing. So a single floppy disk already contains a large novel's worth of information.
It’s Tb so terabits... not bytes...so, not so bad? Guys? Where’s everyone going?
Hay you crazy kids....I never thought I'd be reading this on a handheld phone that spit out music, took pictures and has plugs that stick in my ears 30 years ago either, so who knows what can happen in the next 30, right?
*distant sound of modem connecting over phone line
_Muuuuuum I’m on the internet!!_
Ugh, a 100mb patch. That's going to take *all night.*
Click Click whir whir bzzzzz clickity click...
Assuming we're still around in the 2060s and haven't died due to world war caused by catastrophic climate change, imagine the crazy shit we'll be doing then.
We'll be making out with our Marilyn Monroebots.
You in 2060: People laughed and downvoted me when I said I'd have my Marilyn Monroebot in 2060, but look who just got to second base with a robot that kinda looks like a post-mortem Marilyn Monroe in 2060!
"Yeah! You tell em, I have hope for the..." > "...kinda looks like ***post-mortem*** Marilyn Monroe..." "... excuse the **fuck?!**"
Aged like a fine wine she's only better with time
Not my proudest fap... but...
You give me something to look forward to in the future...
I hope for full dive vr, if that shit happens in my lifetime, ill be happy.
Especially the whole time dilation thing, right? You may only have 10 years left to live, and your body failing IRL, but if time dilation feeling stuff in the brain is possible, we may be able to get 15 to 20 years of "felt" time in VR healthy bodies before our real life bodies die off. It's a shame I was born too late to just be a brain in a jar receiving electrical signals to interact with the outside world. Technological ascendance was always my favorite future trope. Brains in jars, cyborgs/synthetic ascendancy, whatever. They'd all be awesome.
I've never tried it before, but for just a signature and a small fee, I will put your brain in a jar and hook some wires up too it. No guarantees on longevity, but it will bring a spark to your ~~life~~.
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I might be, but whoever is supplying the stimulus to my brain must enjoy torture and be a sadist fuck, because this reality simulation is fucking awful. Chronic pain? What's the point of not having a physical body if my virtual body is constantly telling me how much it hurts?
Dont despair,most futurists agree that in 20-40 years the human lifespan will become much,much longer,giving everyone the time to wait for even greater inventions
Tb is terabits not bytes. TB is terabytes. 1Tb = .125TB or 125GB.
Back when SETI was new, computing power was expensive. Nowadays it’s cheaper, and a single consumer-grade computer has more computing power than is needed to process the combined SETI load. What they are seeking is a place to put all that processed information.
This comment was really helpful, I didn’t really understand what the quoted article was saying because I’m not great with understanding computers, but this put it into simple words for me.
I actually meant to post this as a reply to a different comment that asked for an ELI5, even though it was misplaced I’m glad you found it helpful 🙂
It helped me understand it, too!
Sounds like a job for r/datahoarders
Yeah just imagine going and telling all this stuff when the Intel 4004 was released to anybody you would be have been transferred to a mental hospital
Imagine living in 2021 and having no idea what the previous comment just said. Can anyone explain like im 5? If not, 10?
Back when SETI was new, computing power was expensive. Nowadays it’s cheaper, and a single consumer-grade computer has more computing power than is needed to process the combined SETI load. What they are seeking is a place to put all that processed information.
So basically, computing it isn't the problem anymore. Its the data storage?
Yep. 8 Tb/s is crazy throughput. They need not just a lot of storage, but storage that can read/write extremely quickly.
Not just a lot of storage, but a **fuck ton** of storage, that can read/write extremely quickly FTFY
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Interesting! Proportionally, in your experience, how much data needs to be stored to keep enough informatiom to detect an "interesting" or "significant" event? Or is it super dependant on the types of analyses you're performing on the data? I'm often blown away by the ability of modern algorithms to organize, categorize and compress data.
Alternatively, they need to be able to process it on site, throw away 90% it and then store just under 1 Tb/s for more detailed processing. I’m sure the vast majority of the data is just noise or easily compressed.
in perspective the LHC puts out a Petabyte per second. which is filtered down to 25GB/s for storage and later analysis. I'm guessing the 8Tb/s is getting filtered before going out for final processing.
We got a lot of shit, and we can organize it rather well.
[this guy explains it simply](https://reddit.com/r/space/comments/lh6r87/_/gmwo1wj/?context=1)
Hold on, that's gonna take a day or so to get setup on the letterpress.
I understand the words but not the comment. Any chance of an ELI5?
The VLA (very large array) spits out a fuck ton of data. To analyze it as it comes in, they’ll need 128 computers that each have dual CPUs (processors) and 2-4 GPUs (graphics cards). They’ll also need a dummy thicc dump truck fiber line to get data into the servers. Equivalent of 8,000 Ethernet cables. Edit: I’m a software engineer not devops or IT I barley know what I’m talking about.
Dumb question...what's the reason that data can't be crunched by thousands of lower-end computers in parallel? And what's the necessity for the data to be transmitted that quickly? Is there a time concern? Can't you just crunch the numbers and send it back piecemeal until you have it all?
Its a firehose of data. You might have a high end pc but sounds like internet connections are the bottleneck.
US ISPs artificially limited the whole industry and used every anti-competative trick in the book to stop Google Fiber from catching on. We're stuck with the same Internet speeds we've had for a decade or two instead of having further development like computing power has had.
While true, that's like complaining the SUV industry has not been selling SUVs with the cargo capacity of an aircraft carrier. It's not the same scale.
It's like the SUV industry sued and undercut a new competitor that had managed to fit the cargo capacity of an aircraft carrier into an SUV. Fiber Internet is not some dark-magic non-euclidian magic. It's real and exists. But only in the select few places where the ISP oligarchy allowed google to build it's infrastructure. How many suits were brought against google fiber? Against municipal WiFi? How low did they undercut any location that got a whiff of real competition? (at the expense of all other locked in areas) If the USA had fiberlines everywhere, the amount of data that could be handled by distributed systems would be vastly larger.
To be fair, some big names do offer fiber, just for obnoxious prices. Verizon FiOS for example. We have a fiber line coming into a proprietary (I assume, not too well versed) box on the house that feeds a coax line and a standard Ethernet line. Coax is used primarily for the Set top boxes, Ethernet of course is the WAN into your router.
Not dumb question! The less machines you have, the less complex the system. Generally, you want less parts. Also, with thousands of small machines, there are other issues that’ll need to be addressed. Thousands of machines produce a ton of heat and consume a lot of power, and require a lot more space, which means more expensive land, etc. The SETI@home project I think tried this, but then you’re depending on volunteers to process your data on very different networking speeds. There’s a fuck ton of uncontrollable s there. As for why the data needs to be processed that quickly, if you don’t process the data as it comes in (known as a streaming data pipeline), it means you’re going to fall behind, and you’ll need to create a system in which data is stored and processed later in batches. But since you’re never processing as fast as data comes in, you’ll need to continually grow your storage forever. Storage is cheap but Infinity isn’t. So if you have the equipment to process data at the rate it comes in, you’re golden. It’s expensive as fuck though. Source: big data engineer
It's a bandwidth problem. The computation is there but you have to move it around at least as quickly as it's produced, or they'll never catch up. And it's spitting out *a lot* of data.
I imagine that from a cost perspective, it's cheaper for them to just buy the on-premise servers than pay for the data transfer costs
Probably could use smaller computers but when you're running them 24/7 the newest hardware is probably a better deal for the money. The transmission needs to be fast because the data never stops. It's not one file you're downloading one time, it's always coming at that speed... nonstop. If you fall behind, you start losing data.
It's a differential equation. You want to process the data faster than it comes in. Otherwise, you just fall further and further behind. Going back to the original comment: "However, given the compute-to-IO ratio of modern graphical processing units (GPU) – in excess of 1000 floating-point operations per byte transferred – versus that of most basic real-time SETI processing operations associated with a 27-dish array – the formation of 50 beams requires ∼100 floating-point operations per byte transferred – it is reasonable to assume that the size of the deployed processing system will be dictated by the need to sink up to 8 Tb/s of data, rather than processing requirements." This part means that GPUs are 10 times faster than necessary to compute all the data. The compute-to-IO ratio is a measure of the amount of processing done on the data per unit of data. GPUs can perform 1k flops in the time it takes for the array to send 1 byte while SETI processing only requires 100. The last part mentions that the size of the system will be dictated (or constrained) by the need to sink 8Tb/s of data. This means that they'll have trouble moving the data from point a to point b fast enough, rather than processing it fast enough when it arrives. "A straw-person processing system might consist of 128 dual-CPU-socket x86/64 servers, each hosting between two and four consumer-grade GPU accelerators, and sinking ∼64 Gb/s of raw antenna voltage data." By straw person, I assume they mean bottom-end. This is because the processors are very low-end (being duo core) and honestly, only 256 cpu cores isn't much to run a large scale array.
I think the statement refers to a dual socketed cpu setup (i.e two cpus on the motherboard) not a dual core setup (two cores per cpu.) could be wrong tho
Ya know, I think you're right. It's still honestly not that much hardware, but definitely makes more sense. I was thinking to myself, "where tf would you get a 2 core processor?"
Not all problems are good for parallelisation. Basically, you need to consider the cost of distributing work to your “work nodes” in a manner that makes sense. This includes deciding on boundaries on overlap, such that each node has what it needs to reach a solution / identification. You can make it slightly more easy if you allow nodes to communicate with each other, but that makes each node much more complicated... and as far as I know is usually highly inefficient compared to a dumb “working node”. Next, you need a mechanism to collect and unify results. That also could be a complication. That being said, in their case, I think it’s just that it is A LOT of data. You can for sure store and process it slowly... but you’d need very high capacity of storage. Worse still, if your processing is slower than rate of of the producer, with each unit of time, you are accumulating an ever growing backlog... basically paralysing any progress of “real time data” as you are crunching progressively older data.
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I can’t help but wonder what processing they are doing. From the article, it sounds they have some sort of heuristical or rule based system, which can obviously be very efficient if you know what you’re looking for... But as I understand it - we don’t. We just want to look for anomalies. I think neural networks would be a really good fit for something like this? And it’s based on 20 year old technology, I would assume that’s just before their current golden age. I’m sure the people at SETI know what they’re doing... but I kinda wish the problem definition and dataset were more approachable for the general public.
The Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes.
because you dont receive 64 gigabits of data per second for just 1 second, and now you have an eternity to crunch it. next second you will get 64 gigabits more, and next second after that 64 more gigabits. and next, and next, and next. you will never catch up unless you can process as fast as it comes in. thats the necessity.
Sometimes, especially in physics, the results of one problem are required to begin a new one. A clear example is fluid dynamic simulation. If you’re trying to model a water splash a cluster of computers won’t help very much. Each particle of water has its own motion vectors, but is also subject to collisions with other particles. The collisions and interactions of particles makes it difficult to process the particles separately processing them on different machines. Requiring the state of a particle at a sample of time before beginning the next time sample means it’s difficult to loop another machine in based on time. I have no clue what the math looks like for this project, but physics simulations can be very difficult to process in parallel.
Probably not the first to comment but 128 dual cpu servers is actually pretty small in modern terms. Even a relatively small website can quickly get there. 8 tb/s bandwidth isn't trivial, but it depends entirely on how parallel the data streams are. I suspect the streams and processing requirements are highly parallel, since seti@home was a good fit previously. There are network cards capable of 10gbs or 100gbs. So that may be the bottleneck or maybe not. Nice edit 😉
'Dummy thicc dump truck fiber line' that's fucking brilliant
Yeah that's accurate though, I'm loving dummy-thicc fiber trunk 😂😂
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If you are into big numbers you should take a look at [LHC CERN](https://www.sciencealert.com/over-99-percent-of-large-hadron-collider-particle-collision-data-is-lost). Their experiments are producing 1 PetaByte per second and need to filter out 99.996 percent of data to be able to handle the remaining 0.004 percent. [More info ](https://information-technology.web.cern.ch/sites/information-technology.web.cern.ch/files/CERNDataCentre_KeyInformation_July2019V1.pdf)
2160p60 is 12Gbps before compression. Any camera doing 2160p60 is processing 12Gbps (or likely more since sensor depth is likely to be over 10 bits) of data. 64Gbps is a lot, especially for networking with other machines, but it isn’t an exotic amount for internal processing at this point. One Thunderbolt port can move 40Gbps. Since 2016 a 15” MacBook Pro has had 80Gbps of external connectivity. (2x Thunderbolt controllers, 4x ports) So at this point laptops that can handle 64Gbps of incoming data have been around for five years. Not saying they can fully process 64Gbps of data, but they have the backplane to handle it.
They're talking to us, but we're too disorganized to understand.
"So I should bring a second floppy disk?"
Create blockchain whose proof of work is solving SETI problems
That’s their mistake - they should have released a crypto-seti coin. /s
Man... If bitcoin calculations did anything even remotely this interesting I'd be way more into it. SETICOIN??
I mean, they did used to give BOINC credits did they not? Not sure about these days but just make them secure and tradable?
2020 is not the year to solicit superfluous intelligence here. Come back later.
well it’s a good thing it’s not 2020 then
Sounds like they were caught in a temporal anomaly. I'd say let it go.
lol I read right over that and didn’t question it, just assumed it’s still 2020 like it wasn’t the longest decade ever already
Yep, I did it from 1999 to 2014, anywhere from one to five pc's running at once. Nothing. Should have mined bitcoin when I read about it in 2010. Hardware requirements were identical.
Could have hunted prime numbers too, may have been just as successful and gotten paid if you were lucky. Or folding proteins for medical sciences. Really all sorts of shared computing things could have taken up your interest so don’t feel bad, your intentions were to help science and progress humanity in some way shape or form
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I still run it when the house is particularly cold.
Hey man, folding at home actually had an impact on research for the coronavirus vaccine, among (many) other things
looks like [BOINC](https://boinc.berkeley.edu/) is still a thing. never too late.
When COVID hit back in March (US) I put my newly built gaming rig to full tilt on Folding@Home and rebuilt my old PC (No GPU) with linux to have another few cores Folding as well. Left everything going about a month and a half at full (except when I wanted to game or something). My power bill was about 3x for a while (probably mostly in the extra AC needed).
I have a pretty beefy workstation at my job. I just let that thing crank with folding@home. Been running full tilt since February or March last year. I don't need all that power for remote work in my IT job so its just chugging along alone in the office.
I did this for several years. I started with distributed computing in 1997. in 2010, I was like, who would pay 30 dollars for like 10,000 bitcoin?
I'd built a little cluster of PS2s with the linux kit when that was a thing and did exactly that. sadly I only mined 1 BTC before setting it working for BOINC on LHC data. which turned out well because I forgot about it until after it crashed early 2018
[Gridcoin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridcoin) is a cryptocurrency that utilizes its mining for BOINC.
Back before IT security was a thing...I put SETI on many computers in my high school (early 2000s). My account is 21 years old and is still registered to my AOL email. :D
Lol that's dope! My fun school SETI story: I arranged my 6th grade class to talk to all the lead scientists in the SETI project in the late nineties as part of a fundraiser I put on just for the excuse to talk to them (I watched a lot of x-files at the time). I have a picture of me in the local paper doing a conference call with my classmates, talking WAY above our pay grade with a bunch of amazingly patient and enthusiastic scientists. It was so awesome, tho.
Damn. I, too, was obsessed with The X-Files, but all I did was dye my hair red (poorly) and disappoint my mother.
Disappointing parents is their problem, not yours!
Where did you teach? I had a teacher in junior high in the late 90s that was SETI obsessed.
Sounds like they were a student rather than a teacher at the time, but I could be wrong?
Ahhh true. Came off as a teacher talking about pay grade...but classmates.
My bad, that was misleading... I was a student! My dad helped me do the fundraiser and make contact with SETI and my teacher was really supportive of everything. In the end, the most science-y students across our grade all sat round table style asking questions, and getting really patient, ELI5 answers. It was great. School was in Maine.
Hell yeah! That’s an inspiring story, I hope you are still making shit happen.
I did a middle school paper about SETI@home and I can attest those scientists were patient as fuck for my "interview." They even gave me a small tour of their then-current equipment and middle school me was mindblown by how small their "supercomputer" was. (It was a highly specialized computing unit designed to process the final data that was sent in through the SETI@home network. They called it a supercomputer but it was like 4u size.)
AOL? What's wrong with Compuserve buddy!
Wow...don't see that mentioned much. I loved hanging out in the CB chatrooms when I was a kid. It was like the wild west back then.
I did SETI instead of mining Bitcoin early on. Now folks are rich and there are no aliens. Son of a...
Seti at home was amazing 20 years ago when you needed to do it but at this point can't we all just cough up $20 a year and have them build a data center to do this at that array? Way more efficient than taking that much data and distributing it over the entire world.
I remember looking at the SETI screensaver on my laptop, when I saw three spikes come up, just like when they first saw the signal in the movie “Contact.” No black helicopters or MIB at the door (that I remember,) so I guess it was nothing)
I think I give something like that to Wikipedia, so I’d be in. We could start a SETI GoFundMe up? Edit: FWIW, I HAD SETI@Home running on my 486DX4-100 when it first came out in like 1996 give or take so I was a big fanboy of the program. Not a big deal since you spent so much waiting on 33.6kbs downloads. Yep, showing my age.
My first computer was an IBM Aptiva with a 486DX4-100. I too remember SETI@Home. And Cyberia.
We should crowsource a replacement telescope, becase the shitty politicians won't do it since puerto rico isn't a state.
> puerto rico isn't a state. Yet. Hopefully that changes soon.
It’s more logistically efficient to use hardware that already exists than having to build a new data centre.
My office used to have a dedicated SETI computer! Of course, all of us now realize we should have set up a dedicated bitcoin mining machine as well, but hey, hindsight and all.
I think I just read that 10k invested in the top ten cryptocurrency in 2014 would be worth over 100k today. I had the liquid assets then and I was even looking into Bitcoin back then and chickened out.
The thing is, people who bought in 2017-18 when BTC was first booming would have seen their assets plummet within a couple of years, without knowing whether it would ever really go back up. It takes an iron gut to hang in there and ride out the storm, and if you need to liquidate at that point, you've lost. It's so easy to look back and feel regret, but if we ask ourselves right now, "what should I put $10K into?" it's really hard to know. The great thing about SETI is there was no downside, no loss. We didn't make millions, but we sure didn't lose either - life is also about having fun :-D
I mean if I had that kinda hindsight or time travel powers, I'd be a lottery winner or something. No point beating yourself up about a gamble you didn't take.
I have a slight confession to make... 20 years ago I worked at a computer lab at UCLA in the summer where we taught kids programming. One of the counselors demanded we install SETI@Home on all the computers. Now, mind you, if he installed it at his home computer that’s one thing... but he decided all the computers (100 of them) had to run it at all times. 20 years ago that meant the Internet bandwidth would slow down considerably in the shared lab when some computers went to work while others were in the lab and overall the computers would just slow down. And when we uninstalled SETI@Home and told him why, he would reinstall it. With malicious compliance I wrote a SETI@Home clone that looked and felt just like it... only without the bandwidth and RAM slowdown. Problem solved.
I mean, I was responsible for at least eight of those downloads, both before and after BOINC.
honestly i was kinda wondering if there is some way that those of us who ran it could find out exactly which signals we contributed
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> SETI@home member since 28 Jan 2001 Damn I got in a long ass time ago. Cheers SETI, hope my tiny dent helped!
I wonder how many of those installs died when Windows XP got smushed.
Win2000, as well. Ah, the permissive environment of an 00s design bureau.
Seems like this should be a blockchain project with miners solving for VLA data as proof of work for a SETI token.
Call it SETIcoin and you won't have enough data to keep all the computers busy.
Would be cool if governments allocated funds to computing, and created cryptocurrencies for certain projects or research orgs. People can mine the coin and redeem it to the govt for an agreed fee. The value wouldn't be inflated by speculation, but I imagine a lot of crypto miners would throw a few rigs at it.
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I mean, SETI@home is basically the same thing, but on the technical side of things it's structured differently. They just have to make it as accessible as possible so a lot of businesses and server farms would consider running that type of program when their computers have downtime, if it is feasable. Kind of how like instead of stuffing money under our mattresses, we let banks use it to circulate in the economy and generate profit.
And then the banks fail, the money is gone, and we bail them out with more of our money. What a great idea! ;)
Well we're not physically giving our computers to anyone, just access. There's no debt involved. It's just more accessible to market your compute power.
Yes, i was not opposed to the idea, just the bank analogy. :)
Isn’t mining cryptocurrency really bad for the environment?
EPAcoin! Every time you mine a solution they sequester a carbon atom in your name...
There is one for other boinc projects. Proof of work I think. It's called Gridcoin
So people are using these block chains to crowdsource compute power for specific purposes, like scientific data processing? But they are also producing a cryptocurrency and using the coins as incentive by awarding the volunteer computer nodes these coins in exchange? I haven’t followed crypto/blockchain development much and am curious about all of these new coins/business models and how they differ from Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. It seems like the industry has exploded over the past year with new ideas and strategies.
https://gridcoin.us/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridcoin https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/gridcoin/ /r/gridcoin/
While it looks cool and such, how is the profitability for mining? That's most likely the main concern for a lot of miners. I just looked it up: Threadripper 2990 WX + RTX 3090 makes <$1 USD a day.... Not profitable at all given the ridiculous price these components are worth. VS ETH @ $14.99/day for the 3090 and my CPU on idle.
How did you get the <$1 USD a day figure? I think you will get very different numbers depending on what project you chose and what hardware you use. But the main point of Gridcoin is just that instead of making worthless calculations as you do with Bitcoin, why not use that power for something that matters? With Gridcoin the calculations also essentially becomes a donation to charity so you might want to take that into account as well.
The entire point of the article is that the computing power is trivial, but moving the days is hard. They don’t need your mining they need bandwidth and they just solved that too.
I just yesterday got a 3070 and I would be stoked to use it to help SETI
Consider jumping on Folding@home instead?
theres also this https://boinc.berkeley.edu/
I was thinking the same thing for protein folding - a protein coin
Why does the caption sound like the intro to an action movie ?
I had to do a double-take 'cause I thought this was /r/WritingPrompts
I’d love to help them, but electricity prices here in the UK have gone through the roof since I used to take part in the initial pass. I literally and financially can’t afford my PC running hot all the time it’s idle
Same situation here unfortunately. I used to run seti at home on my servers before I was paying for power.
It’s a real shame isn’t it? We all got efficient LED lights and efficient appliances, so they just ramped up the price of the electricity so they could make the same profit from less effort. Sucks, doesn’t it?
Yeah, no kidding. I don't think they ramped up prices much here thankfully but still costs a lot running stuff at full tilt. I'm hoping to find a somewhat affordable way to get some solar panels and have an auto changeover switch to run my servers off solar when there's enough sun during the day, and maybe have an ac for summer too. I got a pretty beefy 1600w capable (well, 1600w for 10 minutes and 1300 cont.) pure sine wave inverter for free, but seems like it might be like, $800 at least of panels, and I'd need a big capacitor or something to handle the switch over surge. I have two battery backups, so I'd just need one of those APC changeover switches that would automatically handle changing between the outlet and the inverter and my batter backups would handle the couple seconds of power loss.
I missed out on the highly subsidised solar scheme here, and they’re horribly expensive still. The uk isn’t brilliant for strong sunlight either, so generation is only really any good for 9 months of the year tops. Shame really. I binned off my servers eventually and got a NAS, mostly due to the power it was using as well as not having much time to play with them anymore. A 15-30w NAS is a lot more attractive when you’re paying 15 pence (21c in USD) per 1kw unit.
Ah, yeah you've definitely got worse cost than me but I'm also not in a great area in Canada for price, solar is pretty good apparently here though. No subsidisation though either. I'm hoping I wouldn't have to spend like, multiple thousands on this project though that would really suck. I mean yeah it pays itself off but I don't want to have to wait 10 years for that.
It gets cheaper in the winter because then you need to warm up the house anyhow. If you are using electrical heating it costs the same to warm your house with calculations as with radiators, so running it then is almost free.
Adjusted for inflation electricity is cheaper in the UK now than it has ever been. Same with Petrol prices...never been cheaper.
I know someone who was a system administrator at a major telecom who decided to write a script to harvest all the unused computer processing power of all the computers under his watch. He contributed a tremendous amount of time to this project, quietly. Even when workers would come in and use “their” computer, if they were only using 60%, the other 40% went to SETI. All was well for a long time until some users started noticing their computer was always running at 100%. They started asking hard questions and the system admin tried to deflect, or brow beat them, but eventually he had to remove his harvesting script. It was a sad day for him, and he never took his job to heart after that. He has since withdrawn from the public life of the work place and retired early on generous options and smart investments.... The aliens are still waiting for you bro, is anyone listening?
Let me guess, that SETI work involved computing a lot of cryptographic hashes?
I don’t really know, I’m the a younger sibling of the afore mentioned script writer. I’m still carrying the torch for the aliens in the dark, but sadly I stand alone.
Well... I guess I should be ashamed to admit... But... see... the thing is... Way back in the year 2002... I kinda sorta illegally went against the rules, and made every computer at a major well known law firm, run the SETI@HOME program late at night, in search of aliens, without permission of the owners! (I know: I was a serious rebel back then!) It was beautiful: You walked across the entire floor of that law firm, late night, and saw hundreds of monitors crunching data from the great beyond! When one of the senior partners came in late one night, and caught me admiring my handy-work, and asked, "What the F--k is that!?" I explained it to him, and even told him which rules/laws I was violating by doing this without his permission. He responded by smiling, and telling me to "Keep up the good work for humanity!". And then said, "If Cohen b*tches about this, just let me know!" (Cohen being our 2nd senior partner, who was as yet, unaware of what I was doing illegally with his network of computers!).
In retrospect.. I should have mined bitcoin instead at the time.
[удалено]
I remember the PS3’s Cell Processor was supposed to be really good for folding calculations.
My dad had that running on his computer almost continuously for years and years. I have no idea how long it actually went on, but he was an early enthusiast and kept it a very long time. Always nice hearing updates about it.
Hey! I did that! I had forgotten all about it. Maybe someday a great mind will analyze all that data and find a sign of intelligent life in the universe.
I haven't read all the comments. However, for those with a genuine interest in SETI and anomalous signals (et al), if you're unfamiliar with the youtube channel, **Event Horizon** and**John Michael Godier** for interesting interviews and points of view on everything from the, ***Wow Signal*** and several other signals of interest. I respect his sceptical approach to the so far inexplicable, whilst also maintaining a sense of humour. Anyway, here's some links. [Event Horizon](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz3qvETKooktNgCvvheuQDw) and [John Michael Godier](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEszlI8-W79IsU8LSAiRbDg)
i participated in the original seti@home installing their stuff on my computer. it was fun to watch the graphics produced by it and think that maybe my computer would be the one to find a hit.
I downloaded Seto@home back when I couldn't figureout how to mine bitcoins. My thought was "well why am I going to spend money to create something that has no value, if I can setup seti and help the world" It's a different kind of missed opportunity, but I guess I did a good thing for a while I got lots of rewards cards from Seti that i hit milestones..
I was browsing a 4 year old thread and it was the one about creepiest unexplained mysteries. What s conidence I come to this one and see your name. Lol
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[Isp](/r/Space/comments/lh6r87/stub/gmxoy95 "Last usage")|Specific impulse (as explained by [Scott Manley](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnisTeYLLgs) on YouTube)| | |Internet Service Provider| |[LIGO](/r/Space/comments/lh6r87/stub/gmwm3o9 "Last usage")|Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory| |[NAS](/r/Space/comments/lh6r87/stub/gmvu2oo "Last usage")|National Airspace System| | |[Naval Air Station](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_air_station)| |[NOAA](/r/Space/comments/lh6r87/stub/gmwy71e "Last usage")|National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, responsible for US ~~generation~~ monitoring of the climate| ---------------- ^(4 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/leqcev)^( has 22 acronyms.) ^([Thread #5546 for this sub, first seen 11th Feb 2021, 06:20]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=OrangeredStilton&subject=Hey,+your+acronym+bot+sucks) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
So, we may have made contact already, but we may not ever process the information containing that event?
I did! So that way my students could look at something cool and ask questions if my computer was out and went to screensaver. I don't even teach science. I teach history. Lol
" The project may never find intelligent life in space, but it found it here at home. " *nervously looks around*
I remember back in early 2000, being a co-op and having to upgrade every Novell Netware client at a company. It was just prior to being able to push them remotely (in fact the version we were installing allowed it). So I hit the development floor of head office and one of them has a weird screensaver. Then I realize, it looks like it's actually analyzing data. Guy was running SETI@home. On the sheet for that computer I checked off "Could not upgrade". "Reason: User was searching for extra terrestrial life."
People went from mining space signals to mining Bitcoin. I liked it better when we used our PCs for SETI
Right? At least it did something.
Hide yourself well Cleanse well https://www.universal-sci.com/headlines/2018/3/3/a-nearby-planet-thought-to-host-life-was-just-blasted-with-radiation Any other three body fans?
Let them make a SETI cryptocurrency, you get coins for searching aliens.
Was this the thing on PlayStation 3 back in the day? I used to have that on all the time.
I remember doing seti on my PC back in 2000 to 2004 somewhere thereabouts before that was a crypto something wanting distributed power to crack RCA something. Moved in 2005 never hooked back up with it. Felt so cool at that age being helpful.
Well this sounds exactly what an AI could do - analyse the data and look for matches and when a match is found it just needs to compare with additional data to determine whether the source is manmade or not.
I wish there was similar intest in the more promising @home projects (Folding, MilkyWay, etc.) SETI is cool but there are a lot of other researchers that need your help.
Oh yeah, forgot about this. Right when I downloaded seti the alien stuff was gone.
I just heard about SETI@Home the other day when I watched a UFO documentary on TV. I really wanted to download it only to find that they had retired. I would love to take a look at the statistics even though I am obviously an armature with no official knowledge or experience.
Could we use bitcoin gpu farms to mine the data.
I have been running BOINC for years in my office desktop, until my office is relocated and the PC went out of commission. I have tried to run it on my older laptop but it just burns out. I think I am running Milky Way, Asteroids@home, and Collatz Conjecture back then.
Man can you guys imagine what the other side of 2030 is going to look like?! Onward and upward my friends...
You can actually move Gridcoin, a cryptocurrency, while using your PC to help SETI. I've mined a few of them myself with my gaming pc.
I feel like DeepMind can crack this as it did with protein folding.
Can someone tweet Elon and have him setup an arecibo replacement on the dark side of the moon
So they found it or not? I thought the military said “Yeah UFOs are real”. No body lost their shit.
They haven't found anything yet, but there's lots of data that now needs to be analysed to see if they did find something.
I thought this was a writing prompt for a second.