Donating to Seti

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Profile Dave Hogan

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Message 1015763 - Posted: 15 Jul 2010, 4:55:24 UTC - in response to Message 1008217.  

Making link live:
Goodsearch

no support via toolbar for Chrome though, but IE and probably other browsers will go! Install it and help SETI in fund-rising!


The Firefox searchbar plugin isn't too bad for GoodSearch. I hate Yahoo, so I keep forgetting to switch back, but thanks for sharing. I'm trying to remember to use it.

So far this month there are almost as many searches in 2 weeks as there were all last month.
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Profile kinhull
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Message 1015784 - Posted: 15 Jul 2010, 8:12:37 UTC

Well I've just installed the GoodSearch Firefox searchbar plugin, let's see what happens.


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Sometimes I think we are alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we are not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.
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Rich-E
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Message 1016175 - Posted: 16 Jul 2010, 12:03:00 UTC

Good morning.

Do you guys take used equipment? Is there anything on eBay that is acceptible? Seems to be a way to use Paypal money and get around the 11% overhead, at least for a while. If SETA gets too much equipment, then maybe you can trade it to BOINC for goodwill.

If there is something you can point to used on eBay that is acceptible to the program, let me know and I will see what I can do from either there or my sources. I saw lots of 750GB Seagate SATA drives for about $50 each; but I'm interested in one of the servers.

As a hobby I do refurb of XP-grade or better PCs that people want to dump, fix their issues, max them out and donate them to Christian non-profits, for what I put into it. Seems a way to help the land fills, get computers to people who need them and get money back from the IR$ for the donation. I've never reburbed a server box, but it can't be that hard. I'll pick up Server 2000something and whatever benchmark you'all would like me to run to make sure it works; but SETI-tech will need to outfit it. I am an integrator, but not a developer.

If that is agreeable, send me an email.

Take care and have a good day.

Rich
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Message 1016251 - Posted: 16 Jul 2010, 15:39:29 UTC - in response to Message 1016175.  

Rich

Here is the Link to Hardware Donations

So to find a workable server on ebay it would have to be
Near Time Persistency Checker compute server:
At least eight 64 bit CPU cores (8 single core, 4 dual core or 2 quad core)
32-64GB RAM
At least 2 root drives, >500GB disk space total
(Current situation: We do not have any server slated for this purpose)

Other than testing the OS does not matter.

Seagate 750's are fine.

Regards


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Rich-E
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Message 1016355 - Posted: 16 Jul 2010, 18:05:45 UTC - in response to Message 1016251.  

Good afternoon and thanks for your reply.

Is something like (the below) in the ball park or is it too old/big? The requirement could be done with a dual-Xeon motherboard, but is relatively new and expensive. Just trying to get a feel of the room.

Rich

URL: http://cgi.ebay.com/HP-AMD-Blade-Server-Rack-40-Blade-Servers-73HDs-/360281248339?cmd=ViewItem&pt=COMP_EN_Servers&hash=item53e26f9253
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Message 1016366 - Posted: 16 Jul 2010, 18:21:13 UTC - in response to Message 1016355.  

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Josef W. Segur
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Message 1016408 - Posted: 16 Jul 2010, 19:43:18 UTC - in response to Message 1016355.  

Good afternoon and thanks for your reply.

Is something like (the below) in the ball park or is it too old/big? The requirement could be done with a dual-Xeon motherboard, but is relatively new and expensive. Just trying to get a feel of the room.

Rich

Hmm, they have a closet space not originally designed as a computer room which has 3 racks in it, no room for another. See the SETI@home Photo Albums page for some sets of photos. The Overland Storage and Intel hardware donations last year will have modified what's in the racks somewhat. They do also have some servers outside the closet, but need to keep the noise down.

Power availability is an issue, too. There's only 120 volt circuits, and they may be close to maximum usage already. Then there's the air conditioning for the closet, which has tripped out a few times...

IMO the requirement is very minimal, in essence not a lot better than what they already have available. Scale it up by about a factor of ten to get a system which would do the job well. That rack might, though I guess more than 2.5 Terabytes of storage and fewer processors would be better. Very nice price, though.
                                                                Joe
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Message 1016419 - Posted: 16 Jul 2010, 20:13:14 UTC - in response to Message 1016408.  

Joe,

Thanks. That gives me a better prosective on the whole requirement.

The closet looks like one of our server rooms. Air, space and power are always an issue.

Take care and I'll let you know what I can scrounge up.

Rich
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Message 1016620 - Posted: 17 Jul 2010, 4:15:42 UTC - in response to Message 1016355.  
Last modified: 17 Jul 2010, 4:16:55 UTC

Rich

Smile, please take this in good spirit!

An excellent find, it definately has ENOUGH Cores. It is a bit over size (size weight and electricity). From Looking you might have a good "subset" of the parts with spares.

For a Blade Server, you have a couple of things required
The Power Supply module(s). Feeds all of the Blade Servers
The Blade Module(s). Can be a 3 Rack Unit or a 6 Rack Unit module
Fiber Channel Interconnect module(s). for the drives in this case.
The Drive module(s). Holds the Basic OS for all the Blades and Data Storage.
The Ethernet Module(s). Interconnects the Blades to "Inside and Outside."

So one 6 Rackunit with 8 Blades stealing RAM from the others should be enough to provide 4 gig to all 32 cores. That would cut the 3 plus year search in half and you could be the Hero!

So the Server has to be able to load the Nix OS (drivers), after that it relies on the Gigabit link to query the Science database (it will have to load the engines for both MySQL and Postgress).

From my understanding which might be less complete is the plan is to initally shift though the Science Database to catalog all the characteristic (3 years to complete as of a year ago). Along with any New Returning Results get checked against any of the locations from previous passes. So realtime Returns are searched first and compared with long standing Results.

From Matt's post they have decided on a basic size of the query (probably due to existing hardware they are starting with of 1 Gigabyte). So more RAM per CPU would allow the query size to increase. Then it is up to the CPU to sort/compare results as fast as the CPU(s) are capable of. From that I would say that as a Minimum the RAM per "CPU Core" should be 2 Gig. Matt's requested specification was 4 Gig "per core." Then if even more expensive Server RAM is available then it could be adjusted. RAM is a part of what caught Bruno.

Regards

Al
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Rich-E
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Message 1016857 - Posted: 17 Jul 2010, 20:19:03 UTC

Okay. After looking around a bit more, let's walk this dog a little further.

The ebay special is a set of 4 blade enclosures that could be split up and memory swapped around the blades. Save drive space (2 ea 500GB), based upon my understanding so far I think it would work with some spares (I have an email into a contractor to see if he could use the extras or he may buy it for himself). Except for the 120V 1Ph requirement which just from a cursory look around, does not look standard. So I'm thinking power takes us out of blades.

So we are looking at something like: http://www.acmemicro.com/estore/ShowProduct.aspx?pid=7959. It has a little bit of upgrade room; but it is not descrete expansion, like a blade. Fed 120V 1Ph and outfitted with 1 ea 8-CORE Opteron CPU, 32GB memory and 2 ea 500GB SATA Seagate, the cost is roughly the same as the ebay special. That base unit would allow others to purchase CPUs, memory or extra drives off of eBay with Paypal and donate as hardware with no overhead.

One side-bar: My assumption is that if the machine advertises Linux x64, it will run NixOS. Is that a correct assumption? I appologize because my background is HP-UX and Solaris; along with Micro$oft. My only exposure to Linux had been rooting for Novell over SCO.

Would this be a better platform?

Take care and have a good day.

Rich

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Message 1016933 - Posted: 17 Jul 2010, 23:16:48 UTC - in response to Message 1016857.  

Rich

Very Good!

Nice second try. Only $3499 before shipping etc. That would fill the bill as the starting server. It would also consume probably (running at full tilt) less than 15% of the power.

As for the Nix OS linux 64 is what they are running, Nix is the abbreviation going way back to Unix. Yes, there are many flavors...

Al

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Message 1016951 - Posted: 18 Jul 2010, 0:30:00 UTC

Good. I will look around and see if I can find something along those lines. If found I will load Linux on it (probably with the help of one of my IT folks) and run some SETI WU's to make sure it works. That alone should be worth a laugh or two.

I assume the details I can work privately via the email address on the hardware donation page?

Take care, thanks for all your help and have a good day.

Rich
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Message 1016958 - Posted: 18 Jul 2010, 0:48:15 UTC - in response to Message 1016951.  

Rich

If you are serious about this then PM me and and I can put you in touch with Eric at the correct time. He and Matt, do like the final approval.

Al
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Message 1017621 - Posted: 19 Jul 2010, 17:09:58 UTC

I received my rebate from EVGA today on a GTX 260 I purchased. As promised the rebate was donated to Seti. They sent the rebate in the form of a Visa prepaid credit card. Worked fine for a donation.

Your confirmation number is: 62238


Boinc....Boinc....Boinc....Boinc....
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Message 1022615 - Posted: 5 Aug 2010, 1:59:03 UTC

Finally got around to donating something today :)

Will try and donate as often as I can.
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Message 1022619 - Posted: 5 Aug 2010, 2:08:19 UTC

Thank you Marine Iguana and welcome to the boards.
Pluto will always be a planet to me.

Seti Ambassador
Not to late to order an Anni Shirt
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Rich-E
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Message 1023417 - Posted: 7 Aug 2010, 11:01:33 UTC

Good morning.

With the server covered you still need disk drives, correct?

Take care and have a good day.

Rich
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Message 1023459 - Posted: 7 Aug 2010, 15:05:57 UTC - in response to Message 1023417.  

Good morning.

With the server covered you still need disk drives, correct?

Take care and have a good day.

Rich

Oh.......yeah. And I think they need a new 'reboot' button too.
"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

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Message 1023465 - Posted: 7 Aug 2010, 15:26:56 UTC - in response to Message 1023417.  

Good morning.

With the server covered you still need disk drives, correct?

Take care and have a good day.

Rich

AFAICT the plan now is instead of having a separate NTPCkr server, Thumper is to be replaced with a new server which will maintain the S@H science database and have sufficient processing and memory to do NTPCkr duties during the 3 day outages.

Thumper is a Sun Fire X4500 with a full set of 48 drives, IIRC 500 GB drives yielding total raw storage of 24 TB. We have basically only Matt's initial posts in the Technical News threads Catchup and Hocket to go on, but it does seem likely they'd want the new server to have a disk array sufficient to handle the database both now and as it continues to grow.
                                                                  Joe
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Message 1023468 - Posted: 7 Aug 2010, 15:37:46 UTC - in response to Message 1023465.  

Good morning.

With the server covered you still need disk drives, correct?

Take care and have a good day.

Rich

AFAICT the plan now is instead of having a separate NTPCkr server, Thumper is to be replaced with a new server which will maintain the S@H science database and have sufficient processing and memory to do NTPCkr duties during the 3 day outages.

Thumper is a Sun Fire X4500 with a full set of 48 drives, IIRC 500 GB drives yielding total raw storage of 24 TB. We have basically only Matt's initial posts in the Technical News threads Catchup and Hocket to go on, but it does seem likely they'd want the new server to have a disk array sufficient to handle the database both now and as it continues to grow.
                                                                  Joe


Oooooohhhhh.
I did my bit last night.......somebody else is gonna have to step up to the plate to buy more drives......LOL.

"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

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Message boards : Number crunching : Donating to Seti


 
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