SETI@HOME -- A Victim of it's Own Success?!?

It's now taking over 1 day for my machines to successfully download a WU! I was considering adding the SETI project to a new machine, but why bother?
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You ask why bother? I would do it because you want to help with the science or you would like to find out whether or not there are other people in the world apart from humans.

Part of the reason for your computer taking a day to successfully download one work unit may have been because the system was recovering from lab wide car appears over the weekend and this servers needed to catch up with the demand of the of the projects large user base.
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Live in NZ y not join Smile City?

It's now taking over 1 day for my machines to successfully download a WU! I was considering adding the SETI project to a new machine, but why bother?

Same problem here why bother? It has been over 10 years now a new profile or design is needed or formula or whatever.
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Same problem here why bother? It has been over 10 years now a new profile or design is needed or formula or whatever.

You ask why bother? I would do it because you want to help with the science or you would like to find out whether or not there are other people in the world apart from humans.

Issue with the project using GPUs to process the work units is they would need thousands of them. A whole room full, needing maybe a megawatt of power, and the same to keep them cool. The project would need to build an actual supercomputer.

The project might take all day to get the work to you, but it's still handling 30-40,000 AP units every day. Imagine the rack of computers that would be needed to do this all stacked up in one place.

As for the compression, my understanding is the data is more like "white noise". A normal compression (zip) doesn't have much effect on it. A "lossy" compression might loose the faint data we are actually looking for, or introduce false data.

So, good questions, but the answers are negative.

That leaves the current situation, where the project is in the fortunate situation of having more volunteers than it can effectively supply work too 100% of the time. Arguably a good situation for the project, but a bit frustrating for the volunteers. Hence the "Victim of it's own success" comment. But, not being able to supply all the work we want is not a failure for the project. It's not even in their "mission statement". If they merely supply all the work that their hardware and net link can handle, then they are doing well.

Leaves us with 2 things we can do.

1 - choose a backup project. Set it for a lower priority, then if you have trouble get SETI work, your machine fetches work from whatever other projects you have chosen.
2 - Raise some more funds so they can buy better servers and routers to allow for more work units to be processed.

Just remember the Project NEVER promised that there would be a steady or unlimited supply of work units. That's just what is happening now.

Frustrating to the guys that are in competition trying to achieve high RACs, but that's not actually a priority of the project.

Ian

Issue with the project using GPUs to process the work units is they would need thousands of them. A whole room full, needing maybe a megawatt of power, and the same to keep them cool. The project would need to build an actual supercomputer.

The project might take all day to get the work to you, but it's still handling 30-40,000 AP units every day. Imagine the rack of computers that would be needed to do this all stacked up in one place.

As for the compression, my understanding is the data is more like "white noise". A normal compression (zip) doesn't have much effect on it. A "lossy" compression might loose the faint data we are actually looking for, or introduce false data.

So, good questions, but the answers are negative.

That leaves the current situation, where the project is in the fortunate situation of having more volunteers than it can effectively supply work too 100% of the time. Arguably a good situation for the project, but a bit frustrating for the volunteers. Hence the "Victim of it's own success" comment. But, not being able to supply all the work we want is not a failure for the project. It's not even in their "mission statement". If they merely supply all the work that their hardware and net link can handle, then they are doing well.

Leaves us with 2 things we can do.

1 - choose a backup project. Set it for a lower priority, then if you have trouble get SETI work, your machine fetches work from whatever other projects you have chosen.
2 - Raise some more funds so they can buy better servers and routers to allow for more work units to be processed.

Just remember the Project NEVER promised that there would be a steady or unlimited supply of work units. That's just what is happening now.

Frustrating to the guys that are in competition trying to achieve high RACs, but that's not actually a priority of the project.

Ian

Another idea: Is the largest input file of Astropulse workunits compressed in any way? If not, would compressing reduce its size enough to be worthwhile, after you add a decompression program to the list of files needed for each workunit?

Another idea: Is the largest input file of Astropulse workunits compressed in any way? If not, would compressing reduce its size enough to be worthwhile, after you add a decompression program to the list of files needed for each workunit?

I've been wanting to ask about this as well. I know it's been raised before and I recall back then that the answer was something along the lines of 'there would be too much stress on the servers to compress every work-unit'. Given that the servers are a lot more powerful now than they were back then, is this still an infeasible suggestion? I'll understand if it is not, but I am just wondering if it is still not even remotely possible. Given AP's 8 MiB WU size vs MB's ~300 KiB, it's clear to anyone that AP WUs consume a lot of what little available bandwidth there is.

No worries. I suppose I should have done that first - for some reason, I had the impression that the 8 MiB file would compress well. But maybe because I'm thinking of the XML part of the WU, which is text-based, whereas the bulk of the WU is binary data, right?
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Soli Deo Gloria

No worries. I suppose I should have done that first - for some reason, I had the impression that the 8 MiB file would compress well. But maybe because I'm thinking of the XML part of the WU, which is text-based, whereas the bulk of the WU is binary data, right?

No worries. I suppose I should have done that first - for some reason, I had the impression that the 8 MiB file would compress well. But maybe because I'm thinking of the XML part of the WU, which is text-based, whereas the bulk of the WU is binary data, right?

Fourteen years later, I think we can trust 8-bit data ;). In theory, the MB application is fully compatible with the 8-bit binary data format used by AP files: some months ago, Eric put a test of this theory on his ever-lengthening Beta 'to-do' list. If that works out, a simple change to the splitter configuration will allow the generation of smaller (denser) data files, without any extra compression/decompression stages - that way, we get almost the same benefit as compression, practically for free. But we do have to find time to test it first...

You ask why bother? I would do it because you want to help with the science or you would like to find out whether or not there are other people in the world apart from humans.

As for the science, the only real science, as far as I am concerned, is with the "AstroPulse" sub-project -- and for the most part, I only accept AP WUs.

As far as finding out if "intelligent beings are out there", I am already 99.999% sure that there are. But as far as ever receiving any signal from "them", I am just about as sure that we will NOT. Why? Mainly because the probability that other "people" with technology similar to ours exist within a reasonable radius (say within 100 light-years or so) at this particular sliver of time in the overall age of the universe is mighty, mighty slim.

That is why I dedicate most of my computer time to projects that have more of a chance of providing some "real" science.

So have at it, all you geeks out there expecting to receive a SETI signal within your life times! :-)