First Signs of the NTPCkr

it needs a boarder to separate the contrast or be larger for with bad eyes :)

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sci_status.html
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HAY! Watch this!
LLLLEEEEEERRRROOOOOYYYYY!
...yikes...

So speaking of "unanalysed data" how about a NTPCkr update?
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Quick update:

The "plumbing" is pretty much done, though there are minor tweaks happening every day here and there. It's pretty much ready for internal beta, but before we do that we'll probably have another meeting to discuss some basic first rev of scoring. Next week or two?

Even if we do start running it today there's massive database cleanup that has to happen first before we can run it against *all* data. Still, we can start right away on a subset (about 20%?) of our data and add more as we clean it up.

Doesn't sound like much has changed since this original post, but it has. Slow progress. I'm really hoping we can it going enough to start creating daily updated plots, web pages, visualization tools, etc. for the general public before May. Even better would be churning through enough data to have enough final products to write some papers (perhaps of the nature: we looked at N pixels and saw X things, and how this falls in line with statistical probability). Why May? That's our 10th anniversary.

- Matt


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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

Message 743622 - Posted 24 Apr 2008 17:41:02 UTC

More news as we progress, I guess...

Slow progress ... Why May? That's our 10th anniversary.

From Matt's Tech News for 2/19:

Late last week Eric, Jeff and I had a quick meeting to discuss current candidate scoring algorithms - we're pretty sure we'll have to tweak them as we go, but we're in enough agreement to get started implementing this part of the NTPCker. Jeff's been all over that this week. I'm just now turning my focus back to actual development, too. My software radar blanker now agrees with the hardware blanker 90% of the time, which is a very good start. I can add an additional 5% just by adjusting thresholds, but the real test is to run software blanked data through the pipeline and see which workunits generate more RFI (the ones using hardware blanking or the ones using software blanking).

Update:

From Kersey (Mar 03 2009)

Helped Jeff walk through NTPCkr code this morning, tracking down bugs, etc. In essence the goal of this program is simple - to find groups of signals in our data that fall within a certain window of frequency/space but have been seen over multiple observations, and preferably near stars/planets. But it's actually quite complicated - there's a lot of set analysis/manipulation requiring chunks of dense code where bugs can hide if you're not careful. Plus there are always new "special cases" we find (or dream up before we find them) that we need to consider. In any case, we're pressing to get this thing rolling and producing non-zero results before the 10 year anniversary of the SETI@home launch in May.

From Matt's Tech News for 2/19:

Late last week Eric, Jeff and I had a quick meeting to discuss current candidate scoring algorithms - we're pretty sure we'll have to tweak them as we go, but we're in enough agreement to get started implementing this part of the NTPCker. Jeff's been all over that this week. I'm just now turning my focus back to actual development, too. My software radar blanker now agrees with the hardware blanker 90% of the time, which is a very good start. I can add an additional 5% just by adjusting thresholds, but the real test is to run software blanked data through the pipeline and see which workunits generate more RFI (the ones using hardware blanking or the ones using software blanking).

. . . clears throat - uhmmmm, any News to Post here?

Necromancing for no news.
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Update from 8/4 Matt's Tech News:

People asked about the NTPCkr pages. Oh yeah.. That.. Jeff and I were pushing on those last month, then I disappeared on vacation, and then we both were at the OSCON in San Jose, and then the new replica server finally started working so that's been occupying our time, along with scrounging data together to process. Sorry about the delays. I know we're close to publishing something. This is kind of an important addition to the web site so we want to make it kinda works before embarrassing ourselves with broken/misleading information.

When the the NTPCkr will scan the data in realtime, how will the 2004-2009 data been analysed (radar, ect.)?

Update from 8/5 Matt's Tech News:

NTPCkr: Jeff and I met this morning to discuss the current status of what we need to do to get this thing on line. To be clear, Jeff has been doing pretty much all the work on the NTPCkr engine, and I've been helping with the cosmetic/web stuff. Anyway, Jeff has a couple bugs to clear up. Nothing major - things like the reporting mechanism sometimes spits out the same candidate twice. I've been working on web site stuff, like putting in all the hooks to allow people to discuss candidates amongst themselves on a separate forum. Once we clear up our current set of bugs/updates I'll fire up a daily cronjob which will (a) generate the current "top ten" list, (b) pull all the data from the science database from these candidates (if not already on disk) for plotting purposes, and (c) create discussion threads for each candidate (if they don't already exist). Then we're live, but we'll have many "version 2.0" tasks to address right away.