Technical NEWS in case some one missed it

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Profile Byron Leigh Hatch @ team Carl Sagan
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Message 258422 - Posted: 7 Mar 2006, 2:16:36 UTC




My Very Best Wishes and Kindness to all ----- to all in our SETI@home/BOINC Community
Keep on Crunching.
Byron


Technical NEWS in case some one missed it







The splitters (which create work) are still catching up from the high demand after the extended outage. While they are generating just barely enough work to send out to users, they are unable to create a large queue of backlogged work to send to participants who request large numbers of workunits at a time. So this isn't a policy decision - this is a supply/demand issue. If we are flush with work to send out, we give people what they ask for. [edit - and as stated below in another response - you can configure your settings to try and get more work].

The master science database isn't on UPS because we don't have a spare UPS at the moment for it. Most of our UPS's are in the server closet, and the master sci db is not currently in the closet - as up until very recently there wasn't any room for it. Plus we don't have the cash to buy a UPS if we don't need it. Why the cavalier attitude about the master science database? We back it up to tape regularly, it's on robust RAID, informix has proven itself quite able at recovering from sudden outages, and we currently can't afford an extra UPS for this power-hungry system, especially when in the near future we won't need it. And data lost is recoverable - we can always resplit tapes that got corrupted - but so far we haven't had to resort to that. This is policy, as is the fact that we don't "hide" outages from our users anymore like we did in Classic by sending out redundant work. Joining other projects is strongly encouraged.

- Matt
____________
-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development
-- More inside info at my blog: What the Hell Happened?!





My Very Best Wishes and Kindness to all ----- to all in our SETI@home/BOINC Community
Keep on Crunching.
Byron


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Message 258557 - Posted: 7 Mar 2006, 8:50:56 UTC
Last modified: 7 Mar 2006, 8:54:13 UTC

Thanks

You will also be aware that Matt mentioned he thinks the Mail Server has a problem. The problem seems to be allowing the U/L of completed results, but subsequent staged (ready to report, etc) stall.

Please see thread - "Down - again!"
It's good to be back amongst friends and colleagues



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Profile Byron Leigh Hatch @ team Carl Sagan
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Message 258581 - Posted: 7 Mar 2006, 11:46:19 UTC
Last modified: 7 Mar 2006, 12:46:08 UTC



My Very Best Wishes and Kindness to all ----- to all in our SETI@home/BOINC Community
Keep on Crunching.
Byron


thank John Clark




Hmm. Looks like our mail server crashed, and all the machines in the network are hanging on that. Maybe they'll push through eventually, but we'll probably be hurtin' all night. I'm not going up to the lab to kick the server. I'm going to sleep.

- Matt
____________
-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development
-- More inside info at my blog: What the Hell Happened?!



thank John Clark



My Very Best Wishes and Kindness to all ----- to all in our SETI@home/BOINC Community
Keep on Crunching.
Byron



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Message 258588 - Posted: 7 Mar 2006, 13:03:35 UTC
Last modified: 7 Mar 2006, 13:21:58 UTC







The splitters (which create work) are still catching up from the high demand after the extended outage. While they are generating just barely enough work to send out to users, they are unable to create a large queue of backlogged work to send to participants who request large numbers of workunits at a time. So this isn't a policy decision - this is a supply/demand issue. If we are flush with work to send out, we give people what they ask for. [edit - and as stated below in another response - you can configure your settings to try and get more work].

The master science database isn't on UPS because we don't have a spare UPS at the moment for it. Most of our UPS's are in the server closet, and the master sci db is not currently in the closet - as up until very recently there wasn't any room for it. Plus we don't have the cash to buy a UPS if we don't need it. Why the cavalier attitude about the master science database? We back it up to tape regularly, it's on robust RAID, informix has proven itself quite able at recovering from sudden outages, and we currently can't afford an extra UPS for this power-hungry system, especially when in the near future we won't need it. And data lost is recoverable - we can always resplit tapes that got corrupted - but so far we haven't had to resort to that. This is policy, as is the fact that we don't "hide" outages from our users anymore like we did in Classic by sending out redundant work. Joining other projects is strongly encouraged.

- Matt
____________
-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development
-- More inside info at my blog: What the Hell Happened?!


6 Mar 2006 22:54:57 UTC - Posted and Copied from:_here_






My Very Best Wishes and Kindness to all ----- to all in our SETI@home/BOINC Community
Keep on Crunching.
Byron



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Message 258595 - Posted: 7 Mar 2006, 13:22:07 UTC - in response to Message 258588.  

this is exceptionally frustrating considering I'm trying to set up a new machine for the first time

I keep getting -107 errors. Guess there's just no work to be sent out.

'
2006-03-07 05:21:31 [http://setiathome.berkeley.edu./] No schedulers responded
2006-03-07 05:21:31 [http://setiathome.berkeley.edu./] Couldn't connect to URL http://setiathome.berkeley.edu./.
'

S@H kicks ass
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Message 258597 - Posted: 7 Mar 2006, 13:29:27 UTC - in response to Message 258595.  

this is exceptionally frustrating considering I'm trying to set up a new machine for the first time

I keep getting -107 errors. Guess there's just no work to be sent out.

2006-03-07 05:21:31 [http://setiathome.berkeley.edu./] No schedulers responded
2006-03-07 05:21:31 [http://setiathome.berkeley.edu./] Couldn't connect to URL http://setiathome.berkeley.edu./.
'
S@H kicks ass


See thread: Down ... again?! in the top of the list. Missed that one at first too.
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Message 258717 - Posted: 7 Mar 2006, 19:35:57 UTC
Last modified: 7 Mar 2006, 19:44:37 UTC




My Very Best Wishes and Kindness to all ----- to all in our SETI@home/BOINC Community
Keep on Crunching.
Byron




__ :-)

News

March 5, 2006

Tony/Knightrider/Chuggybus has
created BOINC coinage. See the Large
and small versions.
The Latin text means
'Berkeley open and shared resources'___ :-)






My Very Best Wishes and Kindness to all ----- to all in our SETI@home/BOINC Community
Keep on Crunching.
Byron



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Message 259655 - Posted: 9 Mar 2006, 20:37:16 UTC
Last modified: 9 Mar 2006, 21:34:19 UTC







Last updated: (9 Mar 2006 19:36:33 UTC)




We have been busy working on several long term projects which will improve the power and scientific output of SETI@home. Most of our time over the past year has been applied to the task of building and releasing the next generation of SETI@home software using BOINC volunteer computing infrastructure. With this effort winding down, we will apply more resources to the following projects.


SETI@home Enhanced


Because Moore's law has been continually increasing the computing power of our volunteers, we developed a new SETI@home application with increased sensitivity. The original SETI@Home stepped coarsely through doppler drift rates. Because of this, there was a possibility of a Gaussian shaped or pulsed signal drifting out of a frequency bin during the duration of the analysis. These signals would be recovered later when the analysis is performed at lower frequency resolution. However, because more noise is included in the analysis performed at lower resolution, it decreases our sensitivity to such signals by a factor of two. Before now there wasn't enough computing power available to perform the full analysis at high resolution.

This new application is currently in beta-test. The BOINC core client will automatically update SETI@home to the new enhanced version once it is made available. Since there is more computing involved, users will notice a greatly increased turnaround time per work unit. Since BOINC credits by computation and not by workunit, this will not change the rate at which you receive credit. We will also extend the return deadlines since clients will be crunching on workunits for longer periods of time.


Multi-Beam Data Recorder


We are developing a high speed data recording system to take advantage of the new 7 beam ALFA receiver at Arecibo. Conceptually similar to the SETI@home I data recorder, it has been redesigned with a number of improvements.

It is capable of taking data much faster than the current recorder. While maintaining the sampling rate and instantaneous bandwidth of the SETI@home I recorder, the new system is more than capable of taking data from all 7 beams (better sky coverage) at both linear polarizations (more sensitivity). The current recorder takes data from beam at one polarization.

The new recorder will be able to monitor the pointing coordinates of the telescope. When the telescope is tracking a point on the sky, the frequency band being recorded will be periodically changed. This will give us greater frequency coverage rather than redundant coverage of just one part of the spectrum.

The new recorder will monitor the receiver state and when the ALFA receiver is off (for example, when AO is transmitting), data acquisition will be idled in order to conserve tape resources.

The data recorder consists of front end hardware, a host computer, an array of high speed disks, and an SDLT tape drive. The front end receives the analog signal from the receiver, converts it to a lower frequency and digitizes it. The host computer receives the digital data, collates it with timing and pointing data and writes it to tape, using the disk array as a buffer. It also makes decisions on whether or not to take data and controls frequency stepping.

Since the raw data will be organized in a different manner, we will be developing a new SETI@home application in order to analyze data in this new format.


Near Time Persistency Checker


After applications return signals they are validated and stored in our master database. The goal of SETI is to find similar signals that appear at the same frequencies and points in the sky, but at different times. With a database containing billions of singals, this is a rather large task to do all at once. In the past we had no choice - we didn't have enough resources to create a real-time data analysis pipeline that wouldn't clobber our entire project. In fact, as of August 2005 we still had over 50 tapes' worth of data that had yet to be validated and put into our master science database.

But now we are using BOINC, which has the ability to hand us reduced data for final analysis within minutes of client completion. Plus our new master science database is on a machine with more memory and faster disk throughput. For the first time since its inception, SETI@home has the potential for finding the most interesting repeating signals soon after these singals enter the database. We hope to have daily reports updated with the current "best" results when this system in put into place.

Read more about near time persistency checking here.


Astropulse


The current SETI@home application looks for signals that are narrow in frequency, but have long duration. That's one way that an extraterrestrial civilization can send a signal that stands up above the radio background noise. Another possibility is that they could put a lot of power into a short duration pulsed signal that has a wide bandwidth. As such a pulse travels through intestellar space, interactions with interstellar matter slow down low frequencies relative to high frequencies in a process called dispersion. This dispersion spreads the pulse out over time. If we know how much dispersion a pulse has experienced, we can correct for this effect. For an extraterrestrial signal we won't know how much interstellar matter the signal interacted with on its journey, therefore we have to try every possible dispersion measure. That takes a lot of computing time.


Astropulse is a SETI@home application that uses coherent dedispersion to search for pulsed signals. In addition to extraterrestrial signals we might see signs of evaporating black holes or discover new pulsars. You can read more about Astropulse here .









My Very Best Wishes and Kindness to all ...... in our SETI@home/BOINC Community
Keep on crunching
Byron Leigh Hatch_ (for Carl Sagan)





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Message 259660 - Posted: 9 Mar 2006, 20:47:34 UTC
Last modified: 9 Mar 2006, 20:48:55 UTC

Whoops appologies for my thread on the subject I did not see this post :-(


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Message 259705 - Posted: 9 Mar 2006, 23:06:31 UTC - in response to Message 259660.  

Whoops appologies for my thread on the subject I did not see this post :-(


FWIW I far prefer the approach you took, posting a link rather than quoting the whole page. It's not as if the info is hard to access, considering that the page is even in the same domain as these message boards!

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Message 259716 - Posted: 9 Mar 2006, 23:18:05 UTC - in response to Message 259660.  
Last modified: 9 Mar 2006, 23:29:18 UTC

Whoops appologies for my thread on the subject I did not see this post :-(




hi Appetiser



I,m very sorry and I sincerely apologize


My Very Best Wishes to you Both
byron


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Message 259717 - Posted: 9 Mar 2006, 23:18:30 UTC - in response to Message 259705.  
Last modified: 9 Mar 2006, 23:29:54 UTC

Whoops appologies for my thread on the subject I did not see this post :-(


FWIW I far prefer the approach you took, posting a link rather than quoting the whole page. It's not as if the info is hard to access, considering that the page is even in the same domain as these message boards!



hi Odysseus

I'm very sorry and I sincerely apologize


My Very Best Wishes to Odysseus
Byron


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Message 259724 - Posted: 9 Mar 2006, 23:27:45 UTC







Exciting News about .... SETI@home


http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_plans.php



My Very Best Wishes and Kindness to all ...... in our SETI@home/BOINC Community
Keep on crunching
Byron Leigh Hatch_ (for Carl Sagan)







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Message 259728 - Posted: 9 Mar 2006, 23:29:40 UTC

That makes it like the 3rd time you have said it now!! lol
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Message 259734 - Posted: 9 Mar 2006, 23:35:49 UTC - in response to Message 259728.  
Last modified: 10 Mar 2006, 0:00:45 UTC


Halifax--lad , wrote the folling



That makes it like the 3rd time you have said it now!! lol






hi Halifax--lad ,


I'm very sorry and I sincerely apologize


My Very Best Wishes to , Halifax--lad
Byron


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Message 259783 - Posted: 10 Mar 2006, 0:03:25 UTC
Last modified: 10 Mar 2006, 0:06:03 UTC





Exciting News about .... SETI@home

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_plans.php



My Very Best Wishes and Kindness to all ...... in our SETI@home/BOINC Community
Keep on crunching
Byron Leigh Hatch_ (for Carl Sagan)






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Message 259837 - Posted: 10 Mar 2006, 0:34:46 UTC - in response to Message 259717.  
Last modified: 10 Mar 2006, 0:52:13 UTC

I'm very sorry and I sincerely apologize

My Very Best Wishes to Odysseus


Thanks, but there's no need to apologize so profusely! I'm sure we all appreciate your efforts to bring the latest news to our attention. Not to be left out of the mea-culpas, sorry if I sounded bitchy—as wastes of bandwidth go, that was a very minor one.

(edit: spelling)
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Message 259849 - Posted: 10 Mar 2006, 0:49:15 UTC - in response to Message 259837.  
Last modified: 10 Mar 2006, 1:09:09 UTC








hi Odysseus ........

thank you very much

you make an excellent point .... it dose waste ... bandwidth



I am so sorry ... Odysseus ........ I ment no harm ........... i fell so terrible bad ....


i am feel a little down to day










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Message 259875 - Posted: 10 Mar 2006, 1:39:14 UTC - in response to Message 259849.  

you make an excellent point .... it dose waste ... bandwidth

I am so sorry ... Odysseus ........ I ment no harm ........... i fell so terrible bad ....

i am feel a little down to day


Oooooooooooer... Do I get a "sorry" also?

Those poor phosphors on my old screen have had to endure such a hidiously additional thrashing from trying to glow nicely with your overly big super friendly text...

Perhaps we all need a rest...

But the Big Crunching for Science must go on!

Best wishes,
Martin
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Message 260523 - Posted: 11 Mar 2006, 5:41:25 UTC - in response to Message 259875.  

Oooooooooooer... Do I get a "sorry" also?

No, just a spanking.
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Message boards : Number crunching : Technical NEWS in case some one missed it


 
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