Hannah (Apr 16 2009)

Also, users are down since (at least) February 20th but RAC is down since April 1st?

Well, putting the total SETI users next to the total BOINC users seems to indicate that it is indeed SETI that has the problem out of proportion.




Botched CUDA rollout? Too much downtime? Credit whoring? Obama effect? No general press? Economy hit SETI worse than the others? Or ten years and only one re-observation of a handful of candidates?

____________

A pity, but I cannot see what relevance SETI has for the modern world. If we were to detect any signals, the likelihood of any coherent message transfer in any of our lifetimes is remote.

Bernie

A pity, but I cannot see what relevance SETI has for the modern world. If we were to detect any signals, the likelihood of any coherent message transfer in any of our lifetimes is remote.

Bernie

Really? Can’t see the relevance? The discovery of intelligent life in the cosmos would only change everything. Nothing would ever be the same again. Religion, philosophy, all the way down to how we as individuals see ourselves in the universe, would radically change.

Seems pretty relevant to me.

But you are right, any coherent message swap wit an intelligent life out there within our lifetime is unlikely.

This is a game for people who tend to take the longer view of things. Sadly, most people are not comfortable thinking outside the few decades that mark their own existence, and fail to appreciate the importance of things that go beyond such small snatches of time.

Also all the talk about camping and hiking trips and music gigs and concentrating on incidentals instead of fixing the outage problems and preventing their ocurrence are being construed by many as a lack of caring about the project, and if the project doesn't care, then why should we?

Also all the talk about camping and hiking trips and music gigs and concentrating on incidentals instead of fixing the outage problems and preventing their ocurrence are being construed by many as a lack of caring about the project, and if the project doesn't care, then why should we?

Also all the talk about camping and hiking trips and music gigs and concentrating on incidentals instead of fixing the outage problems and preventing their ocurrence are being construed by many as a lack of caring about the project, and if the project doesn't care, then why should we?

Also all the talk about camping and hiking trips and music gigs and concentrating on incidentals instead of fixing the outage problems and preventing their ocurrence are being construed by many as a lack of caring about the project, and if the project doesn't care, then why should we?

I cannot agree with this, you are referring to Matt's posts where he occasionally refers to what he has been up to when not at work. Post that are well received by the crunchers here. To accuse Matt of not caring!!... words fail me!!!

Bernie

In that SETI@Home has nearly half the computing population of the BOINC universe and a large number of those people are single project types, a major downturn of those people will dominate the movement of the general BOINC population graph.

To get a proper perspective you would need an average graph of all project other than SaH summary population to know if it was a generalize downturn or a downturn because of something specific to SaH.

Economic downturn yes, loss of jobs yes, but 10% unemployment still means that 90% employment exists. I know the only change *I* have made is to turn off one computer, but that was because of 90 degree weather ... nothing more ... and it was my slowest ... and besides, I don't do much SaH ...

All I am saying is that you have to be careful with graphs and data like that... you can see exactly what you want to see if you look hard enough ...

The downturn is most likely a result of many factors... some of which are out of SETI@Home control. However, complaining about lack of computing power but not being able to distribute enough work to keep up with demand is dishonest to SETI volunteers.

From what I've seen over at Anandtech, we've lost many over the past year because of work outages. People start crunching other projects for a few days and it's no big deal, but when it drags out into 10+ days they go away for good. We have one team member who has literally dropped 20,000 pts/day. His total boinc output is the same, he's just shifted a lot of his rigs to other projects.
____________

I tend to think that Astropulse has a lot to do with the smaller crunchers quitting. The number of AP units I get which have been sent out 4 or 5 times is at least 30% of my total and probably 95% of the abandoned units are from P4's or lower.

These slower machines can take up to 10 days of crunching time to complete an AP unit. I can understand someone looking at their machine, seeing that the Completion Time figure is hardly moving and assuming that the unit has locked up or, just getting cheesed off with the time it's taking and aborting the unit. After a couple of these long units they think "stuff it, I'm not achieving anything" and switch off altogether.

I also get the feeling that apart from a select few, we are not held in very high regard by the project administrators, probably at the level of lab rats. They appear to act in a very high handed way toward their minions, a "crunch what we give, take it or leave it" attitude. Unfortunately quite a few have chosen to leave it. The major examples of this are the introduction of Astropulse, which should have been an "Opt In" project instead of an "Opt Out", and the entire CUDA debacle. CUDA, although it has been stabilised to a large degree still has major problems. The only reason it has improved to the state it has is because of the volunteer, 3rd party efforts of Raistmer and the other Lunatics. SAH admin has been very quiet on the matter, almost in denial that there ever were problems. A couple of buggy clients from BOINC Central and continuing server problems hasn't helped much either. (Question, Where DOES that money we donate go ? Most of us donate believing the money will be used to help solve these problems, but things are getting worse, not better.)

I'll probably get toasted for saying this but you only have to read the forums to see I'm not the only one feeling this way. As any admin of an organisation that depends on volunteers will tell you, if you get too arrogant and start taking your volunteers for granted they will vote with their feet. It's evident that quite a few have voted.

Brodo

I tend to think that Astropulse has a lot to do with the smaller crunchers quitting. The number of AP units I get which have been sent out 4 or 5 times is at least 30% of my total and probably 95% of the abandoned units are from P4's or lower.

These slower machines can take up to 10 days of crunching time to complete an AP unit. I can understand someone looking at their machine, seeing that the Completion Time figure is hardly moving and assuming that the unit has locked up or, just getting cheesed off with the time it's taking and aborting the unit. After a couple of these long units they think "stuff it, I'm not achieving anything" and switch off altogether.

I also get the feeling that apart from a select few, we are not held in very high regard by the project administrators, probably at the level of lab rats. They appear to act in a very high handed way toward their minions, a "crunch what we give, take it or leave it" attitude. Unfortunately quite a few have chosen to leave it. The major examples of this are the introduction of Astropulse, which should have been an "Opt In" project instead of an "Opt Out", and the entire CUDA debacle. CUDA, although it has been stabilised to a large degree still has major problems. The only reason it has improved to the state it has is because of the volunteer, 3rd party efforts of Raistmer and the other Lunatics. SAH admin has been very quiet on the matter, almost in denial that there ever were problems. A couple of buggy clients from BOINC Central and continuing server problems hasn't helped much either. (Question, Where DOES that money we donate go ? Most of us donate believing the money will be used to help solve these problems, but things are getting worse, not better.)

I'll probably get toasted for saying this but you only have to read the forums to see I'm not the only one feeling this way. As any admin of an organisation that depends on volunteers will tell you, if you get too arrogant and start taking your volunteers for granted they will vote with their feet. It's evident that quite a few have voted.

Brodo

Slow steady progress since the last tech news item. The science database continues to be massaged into shape from the past month of nastiness. It's working, but some indexes are still missing, and some queries are taking longer than we'd like. Sometime, probably next week, I'll turn the science status page updates back on - until then the numbers are old and/or flat out wrong.

We're narrowing down the cause of our data recorder woes to either the SATA card or the system itself. We're trying the former first. A new one is on order and we'll have to get it configured remotely (which is a lot easier than configuring a whole new system remotely).

We're also finding that we don't have the processing power we'd like. It seems like we lost a lot of active users over the past few months. I blame the recession. You could also blame Astropulse, I guess. In any case, we need more people. We're hoping the 10th anniversary buzz will help. And speaking of that, Jeff and I are putting all focus on the NTPCkr, just so we have something fun/new/interesting to present in time for any p.r. blitz. That means very little effort in systems/upgrades/etc. for the next 5-6 weeks. Simply don't have the time/manpower.

Sorry about the lull in tech news items. I was on vacation visiting 23 relatives. Many are under 5 years old, which meant a lot of them have colds, which meant I got sick immediately upon my return, earlier in the week.

- Matt

( Excuse me for the texte in french, but, i'm not able to translate that correctly )

En 1999, comme de nombreuses personnes, j'ai installé S@H comme "ScreenSaver" et il a fonctionné ainsi pendant plusieurs années en arriere-plan.

Aujourdhui, pour plusieurs raisons, de nombreuses personnes ont acheté ou construit des "Supers Calculateurs" uniquement dédiés à BOINC.

Un temps, ces personnes ont calculé pour SETI et SETI en a profité.
Aujourdhui, SETI a quelques problemes et ces personnes, qui ne supportent pas d'attendre, vont sur d'autres projets.

ce n'est pas un probleme !! Laissez les faire !!

Je suppose que l'equipe de SETI connait le nombre moyen d'utilisateurs sur lesquels elle peut compter.

PS: sur mes ordinateurs, SETI fonctionne toujours comme screensaver en arriere plan et les problemes de SETI ne m'ont pas dérangé. Mon RAC a un peu baissé car j'étais en vacances !!

Si quelqu'un veut bien traduire ce texte, je l'en remercie.