SETI Hardware Fundraisers (With Big News Inside)

Just a daft question. "The 10Gbit switch will become part of a very high speed SETI spectrometer to be deployed at the Greenbank Telescope." I assume that this helps SETI@Home in some way? Because there is no explanation as to what this does.

The spectrometer uses a polyphase filter bank (PFB) to implement a bank of steep cut-off bandpass filters, providing a significant improvement in signal-to-noise and out-of-band-rejection over the common FFT algorithm. The PFB uses a biplex pipelined architecture which allows data to be input and output at the full sample rate, and can do two polarizations simultaneously with no extra cost in hardware or data flow rate.

Unfortunately we haven't garnered any new donations today for drives so far. If you'd like to help us take advantage of Newegg's sale on these drives (and thusly save the project around $1200), please visit the links below

Currently we only need 23.8 more drives and each $70 donated is another drive for the project.

Thanks everyone.

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Update with totals:

Total drives needed: 40
Drives funded: 16.8
Ordered drives: 10
Shipped drives: 5
Delivered drives: 0

Pool total: Raised: $120 / Goal: $ 1735.00 : $1,615 to go

To help us out with this project you can:

1. Donate a drive itself by visiting http://www.gpuug.org/content/cash-4-drive-hitachi-gst-deskstar-7k1000c

2. Or you can donate to our general pool for this fundraiser by visiting http://www.gpuug.org/content/setihome-hydrogen-survey-seti-storage-array-hard-drives
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Executive Director GPU Users Group Inc. -
brad@gpuug.org

Update with totals:

Total drives needed: 40
Drives funded: 17.8
Ordered drives: 15
Shipped drives: 10
Delivered drives: 5

Pool total: Raised: $190 / Goal: $ 1665.00 : $1,545 to go

To help us out with this project you can:

1. Donate a drive itself by visiting http://www.gpuug.org/content/cash-4-drive-hitachi-gst-deskstar-7k1000c

2. Or you can donate to our general pool for this fundraiser by visiting http://www.gpuug.org/content/setihome-hydrogen-survey-seti-storage-array-hard-drives

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We had one drive donated today by Mithotar, so thank you very much :)

We're still a bit off of the half way point, so if you've got a bit of spare change and want to help us upgrade two projects at once, please hit the links above. Thanks everyone!
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Executive Director GPU Users Group Inc. -
brad@gpuug.org

Hey Everyone:

We found out yesterday that the project specs for our Hydrogen Survey / SETI Storage Array changed. Turns out the array will be more beneficial to the project if it houses 40 2TB drives vs 40 1TB drives. As a result, istead of 1TB drives, we'll be purchasing 2TB drives now, specifically these drives http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145473

Unfortunately the project specs changed after 15 1TB drives had already shipped. While this isn't a big deal in that these 15 drives are on their way to being processed by Newegg's RMA feature, it is a bit of a delay. Once these 15 drives are refunded to us, we'll be purchasing all of the 2TB drives we have funds for at that time.

Here's where we stand right now:

Total funds needed: $4800
Total funds raised: $1700.33

We've updated the totals of the pool as well as our Donate - A - Drive totals per drive.

I apologize for the sudden change of specs but in the end 2TB drives will make the array much more powerful. Additionally using 2TB vs the original 1TB drives will reduce the cost per GB to SETI by half while giving us more storage space for project data to boot.

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To help us out with this project you can:

1. Donate a drive itself by visiting http://www.gpuug.org/content/cash-4-drive-hitachi-gst-deskstar-7k1000c

2. Or you can donate to our general pool for this fundraiser by visiting http://www.gpuug.org/content/setihome-hydrogen-survey-seti-storage-array-hard-drives
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Executive Director GPU Users Group Inc. -
brad@gpuug.org

Just bought another 5 drives. That should at least get us past the 12 that Eric needed for the Hydrogen survey. Slavic can you give us an update of how many drives we're up to when you get a moment. Thanks.

MarkJ
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BOINC blog

Just bought another 5 drives. That should at least get us past the 12 that Eric needed for the Hydrogen survey. Slavic can you give us an update of how many drives we're up to when you get a moment. Thanks.

MarkJ

Just bought another 5 drives. That should at least get us past the 12 that Eric needed for the Hydrogen survey. Slavic can you give us an update of how many drives we're up to when you get a moment. Thanks.

MarkJ

Will do just as soon as the last RMA comes through (should be Tuesday). Thank you Mark, you're amazing!

Quick bit of good news:

Thanks to Mark and Tbret's recent donations along with Eric managing to acquire 4 drives with the same specs, we can fill out 24 slots of the enclosure with our Tuesday order and get the project off the ground.

As other donors contribute the last 16 drives, we'll ship them over and populate the remaining slots in the enclosure.
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Executive Director GPU Users Group Inc. -
brad@gpuug.org

News update for everyone courtesy of Matt and Dan:

1. The new Brocade 10GBE switch, which will be a large part of the new high speed spectrometer mounted at the GBT will be installed in Oct/Nov. Currently we're waiting on a few additional components to show up before we are able to are able to get the switch hooked up.

Once we get it installed and tested we'll be evaluating the functionality of the new 10GBE switch and planning out another, even beefier switch for a similar project.

2. We've ordered 20 of the drives for Eric's Hydrogen / SETI Storage array. These should be delivered tomorrow (Thursday). These 20 drives along with 4 drives he found will be enough for us to fill up the internal slots on our array and allow Eric to get to work utilizing the array. We still need 16 drives to finish out the external slots, so please help us out by donating a drive or 16 by visiting the links below.

3. Got word today from Matt that our 2 workstations that were crippled in the earlier power fluctuations are up and running at full speed now. Good news :)

4. The closet switch has been installed as of today. It will take a bit of time to slowly incorporate the new switch given that they have to physically move all of the processes from the old switch to our new one. They also have to do a bit of shuffling of the rack units in order to make space for the new switch and connections. With that said this is a fairly high priority task, so expect the switch to be installed, according to Matt, "Sooner than later."

5. From Matt on what GeorgeM and PaddyM are up to, and what the Lab has planned for them:

Both georgem and paddym have been working great, though georgem had been blocked up a bit as we were using it as a temporary storage for Kepler data. A large chunk of that finally finished copying off yesterday so I was able reclaim some space/functionality. The rest of the Kepler data should be off in a couple days. Anyway, they are still pretty much georgem: workunit storage, compute server, and file server and paddym: master science database. I'm not sure if we can add more functionality to paddym as the science database is pretty much a full time job, but georgem still might adopt various BOINC server functionality over time (upload server, download server, scheduling server, internal BOINC back-end server...).

More quick news:

1. Our first batch of 20 drives were delivered to SETI today. These will likely be populated on Monday for implementation during Tues's outage.

2. Matt spent some time today making sure all of our past GPUUG donors got their green stars. If you still don't have a green star for whatever reason, drop me a message or email.

3. We only need to raise funds for 16 more drives before we can call this project finished. Please consider helping us out by visiting the links below.

4. I'm chewing over a new project that's a bit more exciting than HD's. Once we finish the Hydrogen / SETI Storage fundraiser, we'll be in a good position to kick off the newest project.

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If you'd like to donate a drive directly please visit http://www.gpuug.org/content/cash-4-drive-hitachi-gst-deskstar-7k3000-hds723020bla642-2tb

Or if you'd like to donate to the general pool please visit: http://www.gpuug.org/content/setihome-hydrogen-survey-seti-storage-array-hard-drives

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Executive Director GPU Users Group Inc. -
brad@gpuug.org

I think that you have to do some work on your donation tracking pages so that they reflect the actual status of the projects.

With 24 of 40 drives done the Hydrogen Survey / SETI Storage Array project is 60% finished. But on the donation tracking pages it looks very much different. With 240 of 4800 dollars done the project looks to be only 5% finished.

Also, I can't find any page listing the cash-for-hardware donations.

We were given a specific set of specs for this project (make, manuf, specs). If it had been my choice we would've gone with a different drive, but then again even the previously rock solid Seagates are giving us major issues.

With that said we have a 3 year warranty on these drives and if they do turn up sour, we can easily RMA them for new drives.
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Executive Director GPU Users Group Inc. -
brad@gpuug.org

Just had another drive donated. We're down to 15 total needed to finish this project. Thank you!

I know donating a hard drive isn't as sexy as building a server, but it's just as vital to the infrastructure of SETI as the aforementioned servers. For example:

Since our inception, our donors have donated hard drives which are currently:
1. Transporting data between the GBT and Arecibo (2 and 3TB drives) in massive quantities.
2. Housed in our JBOD which is holding GBT data for in house processing and several RAIDS critical to SETI.
3. Residing inside PaddyM, GeorgeM and Synergy
4. Meeting the storage requirements for Eric's Hydrogen survey and SETI data storage.
5. Residing in our two donated workstations which are partially hosting the SETI website.

Please help us out by donating a drive or part of a drive by visiting the links below:

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If you'd like to donate a drive directly please visit http://www.gpuug.org/content/cash-4-drive-hitachi-gst-deskstar-7k3000-hds723020bla642-2tb

Or if you'd like to donate to the general pool please visit: http://www.gpuug.org/content/setihome-hydrogen-survey-seti-storage-array-hard-drives
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Executive Director GPU Users Group Inc. -
brad@gpuug.org

I assume that this helps SETI@Home in some way? Because there is no explanation as to what this does.

I'd like to give a public thankyou to Brad of the GPU Users group for going out of his way to sort my login out which wasn't working. These guys at GPU²G rock!


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Damsel Rescuer, Kitty Patron, Raccoon Friend, Uli Fan,
Julie Supporter, ES99 Admirer, PETA Member, 1st Childhood

Hey Everyone,

Thanks to last weekend, we've cleared our plate for fundraisers which leaves us wide open for new projects.

We're currently waiting for final specs for a new server. This server will be specifically slated to do nothing but replace our two remaining old upload and download servers. Once completed this should stop our issues with trying to find a good server/bad server. when getting work.

I'm also working on getting the project a load balancer donated which, unlike our faulty software based load balancing, should actually go a long way in fixing our upload and download issues, especially the hung connections and instant retries.

So in short, we're focusing solely on fixing our work unit flow issues right now. Once our new project specs come through I'll set us up a new fundraiser, close this thread and open a new one. Thanks for your interest everyone!
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Executive Director GPU Users Group Inc. -
brad@gpuug.org