Blitzed Again (Jul 02 2009)

Looks like we're back in another noisy period, or at least the bandwidth is maxed out enough that it's constraining both downloads and uploads. Let's just try to ride this storm out - it should hopefully clear up on its own.

Regarding the videos I linked to yesterday, there were plans to get the powerpoint images linked into the actual camera footage, but I guess that never panned out. That's fine. Or maybe that only happened on the live feed... Anyway, you get the basic gist of what we're trying to say from this footage. I was kind of rushing through my talk - how do you condense 10 years of effort into 20 minutes?

We were hoping to get the NTPCkr pages up this week but I'm finding that I really need to update the FAQ and other informational pages before making this live, lest we get flooded with common questions. Plus we have a little bit of feature creep, which is okay - better to rush and do these things now or they'll probably never get done.

- 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

But..........I thought changes had been made at Berkeley so that noisy work being split out could not overwhelm the system.
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Boinc....Boinc....Boinc....Boinc....

But..........I thought changes had been made at Berkeley so that noisy work being split out could not overwhelm the system.

But..........I thought changes had been made at Berkeley so that noisy work being split out could not overwhelm the system.

By noisy I mostly meant "chaotic and busy." Yes, there are mechanisms in place to work on multiple raw data files simultaneously to avoid getting deluged with one particularly noisy data file. It's not perfect, though. I'm not exactly sure what's going on currently but I've been busy with other things to do much sleuthing. We're currently pegged on our network - that means workunits are being downloaded as fast as we possibly can send them - so there's not much I can do.

- Matt

It seems to me that the log jams and bottlenecks in the system are ever increasing and are not going to go away.
This isn't a criticism: it indicates the overwhelming success, progress, and participant interest in the project.
I come back to a suggestion that I and several others have raised before; that it may be high time to "franchise" SETI and have several download/upload servers distributed across various universities, perhaps under the auspices of the SETI Institute. This would lighten the overall load and increase the capacity of SETI, especially considering the higher throughput wish-list of analysing a larger frequency domain, as described in Dan Werthimer's endnote speech to the recent 10 year celebratory meeting.
Are the obstacles to this solution something that the volunteer base of SETI can help to address? (e.g. funding, testing, "political" pressure).
Just trying to help.

I think there is merit to the idea of sharing the SETI@Home database to data servers across the Internet and leveraging the distributed servers' bandwidth. P2P networks are very good at demonstrating the power of collective bandwidth for spreading information from a single source :)

But it will require substantial redesign of the way S@H works and will require trustworthy servers to ensure that the data coming back is verifiable.
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I think there is merit to the idea of sharing the SETI@Home database to data servers across the Internet and leveraging the distributed servers' bandwidth. P2P networks are very good at demonstrating the power of collective bandwidth for spreading information from a single source :)

But it will require substantial redesign of the way S@H works and will require trustworthy servers to ensure that the data coming back is verifiable.

maybe it's time to trench the lawn and install that gigabit cable. i know its expensive and labour consuming. too bad berkley is 4 time zones away. i have a 300hp trenching machine.

maybe it's time to trench the lawn and install that gigabit cable. i know its expensive and labour consuming. too bad berkley is 4 time zones away. i have a 300hp trenching machine.

It's more than a short trench, it's a good distance from the lab to main campus.

The other problem: gigabit-capable routers and interfaces.

No need for a trencher- go wireless.

maybe it's time to trench the lawn and install that gigabit cable. i know its expensive and labour consuming. too bad berkley is 4 time zones away. i have a 300hp trenching machine.

It's more than a short trench, it's a good distance from the lab to main campus.

The other problem: gigabit-capable routers and interfaces.

IIRC there is a dark fiber already in place for the run. But it belongs to the campus though not SETI@Home. There is some considerable politics so it isn't just hardware and cash.