The Outsider's Inside View - post#001

Greetings, SETI enthusiasts. As someone who primarily works "at arm's length" from the SETI@home/BOINC group most of the time, I mostly want to use my blog to give a behind-the-scenes perspective of what goes on here, from a sort of "fly-on-the-wall" point of view. I hope such a thing would be entertaining as well as informative. I guess that remains to be seen...hence the blog title, The Outsider's Inside View. Don't like it? Then suggest something else. I thought "The ET Insider" might get me in trouble with Paramount. Not that I watch such dreck anyway.

So who am I and what do I do? I am a postdoc and I study the interstellar medium of our Galaxy. I was brought to UC Berkeley by Eric Korpela, to analyze the atomic hydrogen (HI) spectra created as a (by)product of recording all this SETI@home data. We call this project SETHI, and I've been making datacubes from the over 14-million HI spectra taken with the Arecibo line feed. I do all sorts of other interesting radio astronomy work, about which I can bore you in a later post. My other SETI@home activities are fairly limited - but I attend the weekly Group and Science meetings, which I'm sure will be the source of many sardonic ramblings on these boards (at least until I'm told to stop). Apart from the above, I occasionally get roped in by Dan to help out with anything from confirming telescope pointing data to processing donation cheques.

Seeing as how this is a forum, that means we should talk. Besides SETI & radio astronomy, I have loads of other interests. I think the world would be a happier place if everyone owned a Mike Keneally CD. I am from Canada, and I am a huge hockey fan. Lately I've been dreaming about caves. Is that enough to get things going?

So what else can I say by way of introduction? It might appear that I have rather few credits, being part of the staff and all. There are two reasons for that, one being that I actually have to compete with SETI@home/BOINC processes on most of the machines I use to do my scientific processing. So I probably deserve about 0.1% of Eric's credit, since he's got SETI@home running on so many processors here. The other reason (the real reason, in fact) is that my laptop's hard drive burned out and I haven't installed BOINC on the replacement drive yet (nor am I sure I will).

It's my hope to post a new thread once a week, and if anyone cares to respond with questions, comments, diversions, etc, I will try to answer prior to the next new thread. Is that good board etiquette? I've no idea, but that's my plan for now.

Kevin
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I was brought to UC Berkeley by Eric Korpela, to analyze the atomic hydrogen (HI) spectra created as a (by)product of recording all this SETI@home data. We call this project SETHI, and I've been making datacubes from the over 14-million HI spectra taken with the Arecibo line feed. I do all sorts of other interesting radio astronomy work, about which I can bore you in a later post.

Kevin

Thank You for making this known... Now some people know where the other half of Eric's time goes... As Near I can figure he is juggling about 6 or 7 Half's.

Pappa

Greetings, SETI enthusiasts. As someone who primarily works "at arm's length" from the SETI@home/BOINC group most of the time, I mostly want to use my blog to give a behind-the-scenes perspective of what goes on here, from a sort of "fly-on-the-wall" point of view. I hope such a thing would be entertaining as well as informative. I guess that remains to be seen...hence the blog title, The Outsider's Inside View. Don't like it? Then suggest something else. I thought "The ET Insider" might get me in trouble with Paramount. Not that I watch such dreck anyway.

[Snipped}

Kevin

Hello Kevin. Welcome to the board. I am (a) Misfit. If you encounter any problems in your work feel free to blame me for it. In fact I've heard rumors of a "Blame Misfit" button starting in BOINC version 6. :-D
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Hi Kevin, this proud Canadian is glad to see that there is a Canadian on staff.

Nice first post too. I also would like to know the answers to kinhull's questions, sounds interesting.

Steve
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98SE XP2500+ @ 2.1 GHz Boinc v5.8.8

And God said"Let there be light."But then the program crashed because he was trying to access the 'light' property of a NULL universe pointer.

Lately I've been dreaming about caves.

Hi Kevin, nice to see you on (the) board. (pun intended!)

I'm known as Fuzzy Hollynoodles (among others) and I have been around for some time here.

I look forward to read your posts, it sounds interesting what you are doing. And as I'm not in this for ET, I'm happy to learn that the data from this project and maybe from our crunching is used for science in your field.

And I join kinhull in his curiosity, please tell us more. :-)


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WOOHOO!! A hockey fan among the scientists!!!

Gotta love that. :-)

Great to see you Kevin. :-)

* Go Red Wings!!! *
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Air Cold, the blade stops;
from silent stone,
Death is preordained

Calm Chaos Forums : Everyone Welcome

Thanks for the post Kevin.

So is there something special about the Hydrogen Spectra that we have been working on, on our home computers?

Are you looking for anything in particular?

What kinds of things could you potentially see in the data to make you stop and think "Ooh, that's interesting!"?

What's a datacube?

What is an 'average' day or week like in the SETI/BOINC team?

What's a datacube?

A datacube is a three-dimensional image, which we can create because we measure the HI line across many contiguous frequencies. So whereas an astronomical 'map' is a 2-d representation of the intensity on the sky (the dimensions are some sky coordinate pair, eg. right ascension & declination), we can map the HI line at each frequency we measure, and that corresponds to HI gas at a slightly different velocity with respect to us. Putting all those maps together in a stack, we get a 3-D dataset that we can view in 'movie mode' to trace out HI structures. ...

[quote]
A datacube is a three-dimensional image, which we can create because we measure the HI line across many contiguous frequencies. So whereas an astronomical 'map' is a 2-d representation of the intensity on the sky (the dimensions are some sky coordinate pair, eg. right ascension & declination), we can map the HI line at each frequency we measure, and that corresponds to HI gas at a slightly different velocity with respect to us. Putting all those maps together in a stack, we get a 3-D dataset that we can view in 'movie mode' to trace out HI structures. ...

Are you having to rerun all the tapes yourself or do you have to wait for whatever Matt psuedo-randomly squirts onto the disks?

And what's doing the SETHI crunching? (Any pretty pictures of machine and results? ;-) )

The remaining 8 are on a machine called lando, one of our newer multi-core systems. We have another one, sidious,

Is that velocity assumed to represent distance (Hubble constant an' all that) or do you also see galactic drift?

The remaining 8 are on a machine called lando, one of our newer multi-core systems. We have another one, sidious,

Sorry to be way off topic, but in some relation to what you posted, are you/they naming your/their servers after Star Wars characters? Lando Calrissian and Darth Sidious? That's kinda cool if you/they are Star Wars fans.

The remaining 8 are on a machine called lando, one of our newer multi-core systems. We have another one, sidious,

Sorry to be way off topic, but in some relation to what you posted, are you/they naming your/their servers after Star Wars characters? Lando Calrissian and Darth Sidious? That's kinda cool if you/they are Star Wars fans.

Yeah, I like Star Wars just fine. I think it was Court who named these last two. It's kind of a slippery slope, though. You could get some awful names for machines if you made that your theme for your whole LAN. Lately sidious has been behaving more like a jarjar. But I see that overnight Eric has reconfigured it so I can crunch more SETHI data on it, so I've got 6 more jobs up and running. Three of my other cubes finished overnight, so I've got 58 completed, 86 more to go, and 20 currently being crunched on 4 different machines. I have to say, the excellent level of computing support I get is one of the things that helps me enjoy my work so much.

Here's what's in my MP3 player (in response to Matt's post): Charming Hostess, Christian Vander/Magma, Univeria Zekt, Djam Karet, Egg, Ensemble Modern, Fire Merchants, Gentle Giant, Guigou Chenevier, VolApuk, Harmonium, Hatfield and the North, Heavy Ethics, Isildurs Bane, Explorer's Club, Lars Hollmer, Le Orme, National Health, Of Montreal, Pierrot Lunaire, Present, Queen, Tatsuya Yoshida, Adrian Belew, Weidorje, and XTC. At work I listen to Radio Keneally. Check it out!