more data on the way

Thanks for the update. By any chance could you tell us if the data from the GBT is being sent out yet. Also, thanks for the hard work in getting the project back up and running. Everything working just FINE on my end !!

Thanks for the update. I wondered why my Boinc manager kept telling me there was no data to process!
Ron Z.

Thank you for seeing this all the way through to the fix.

Thanks for keeping us in the loop.
____________

Feel free to send me some unsplit data... Ill take care of it on my end.

Excuse me for asking a STUPID question, but why isn't the data transferred through the internet directly to you at Berkeley? Sneaker net from Areceibo isn't the most efficient way of transferring data.

Please forgive. Meesa so stupid.

The data is recorded at the Arecibo satellite dish onto hard drives. Because we're talking about hundreds of gigabytes worth of data, it is actually faster to ship the hard drives to Berkeley than it is to transfer the work across the internet itself.


Ironically enough, once the hard drives are received at SETI@Home's lab in the Space Sciences Laboratory in Berkeley, the raw data is then transferred to a secure offline storage via the internet. If at any time they need more data, they simply download the raw data files back into the lab to be split and processed as workunits.


I'd imagine it would be possible to connect a fat internet pipe directly from Arecibo to Berkeley, but somebody would have to pay for it. While people may be tired of hearing about it, the truth is SETI doesn't have that kind of money to be paying for big projects like that. I'm not really sure it's practical to get an internet connection from Arecibo to Berkeley when there's more pressing matters in need of attention.

Excuse me for asking a STUPID question, but why isn't the data transferred through the internet directly to you at Berkeley? Sneaker net from Areceibo isn't the most efficient way of transferring data.

Please forgive. Meesa so stupid.

The data is recorded at the Arecibo satellite dish onto hard drives. Because we're talking about hundreds of gigabytes worth of data, it is actually faster to ship the hard drives to Berkeley than it is to transfer the work across the internet itself.


Ironically enough, once the hard drives are received at SETI@Home's lab in the Space Sciences Laboratory in Berkeley, the raw data is then transferred to a secure offline storage via the internet. If at any time they need more data, they simply download the raw data files back into the lab to be split and processed as workunits.


I'd imagine it would be possible to connect a fat internet pipe directly from Arecibo to Berkeley, but somebody would have to pay for it. While people may be tired of hearing about it, the truth is SETI doesn't have that kind of money to be paying for big projects like that. I'm not really sure it's practical to get an internet connection from Arecibo to Berkeley when there's more pressing matters in need of attention.

I wonder if a dfs or a p2p setup would be a viable option so as to "buffer" the transfer of data instead of letting it pile up. Use your volunteers to pull the data to share the load and have them send it to Berkeley(or wherever) to be processed and then sent back to the volunteers for computation. A lot of turns in the road, sure, but before you scoff at the idea, name a better one than the possibility of losing all your data in an unforeseen transit accident.

Two reasons why that's a bad idea:

1) It would be possible to "poison" the data, making it hard to prove the claim if an alien signal is found. There will be peer review to contend with. The data needs to be controlled a bit better.

2) The internet pipe that we all use to upload/download data is already saturated most of the time. Adding in your dfs or p2p idea would make the situation worse. As it is, the data is backed up into a private cloud using a separate internet connection than the one we use for our upload/downloads, so it doesn't have to fight for contention with user's traffic.


If I were a scientist on the project, I would trust data backups more than I would dfs or p2p.