We've started our annual fundraising drive to help raise the money we need to keep SETI@home running and expand it to new telescopes. Your computers provide us with the power to analyze this data, but your donations are an important part of keeping us operating.

If you haven't yet received your fundraising letter, you can preview it here. You can donate at https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_donate.php.

Thanks for keeping SETI@home going!

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@SETIEric

Eric, please read my Message 1898921

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

I suggest to anyone thinking of giving that they do so now so. I hope the proposed tax plan doesn't cut off deductions for giving, but it may. Give today.

Gave my $50 earlier upon receipt of the letter :-))

Hi Keith,

I haven't made a 2017 budget, but it won't be significantly different from last years. Of course, this is a desired budget. The reality is rarely what we desired. In the last year we received about $90k in donations and $150k from Breakthrough Listen. Call it $240k total.

The current staff is me at 75% time, Jeff at about 50% time, and David at about 25% time. That costs us about $220k (including health insurance, benefits, overhead). We would like to hire a sysadmin to replace Matt and a postdoc to work on SETI@home version 10. We've identified some sources of funding that would allow us to make such hires on a "funding available" basis, but finding a good sysadmin that isn't already overemployed can be tough. Finding a postdoc who is both qualified and interested can be difficult as well.

Our data center charges run about $650 per month, so there's $8k. That leaves us about $12k for other expenses, replacement parts, a GPU here or there. I haven't charged SETI@home for any of my travel to conferences in the last two years (I've paid out of my own pocket) to save money.

The big additional expense this coming year is a 300TB storage/splitting system for the Parkes data, which will run about $30k. I was hoping to make that a special part of this funding drive, but I rand out of time.

Eric

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@SETIEric

Done. About time I got that little star back :-)

Tried give on the website, but the form would not work without a phone number. Too bad. Why do you make a phone number required? You have my email and I have an account. Fix the form and I'll donate. Don't and I won't.

Whenever I come across that on International websites, I enter +44 800 0000007, works everytime.

Tried give on the website, but the form would not work without a phone number. Too bad. Why do you make a phone number required? You have my email and I have an account. Fix the form and I'll donate. Don't and I won't.

That would be the UC Giving office a/k/a The Regents of the University of California. Seti@home has no control over the policies of the Regents but must abide by them.

http://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/


P.S. you don't have to give them your number, just a number in the format of a valid phone number eg (202) 456-1111* the White House

300TB storage/splitting system @ $30,000

That works out at $100/Tb. I assume we are talking SSD drives here? If so what size of drive are we thinking of? 30 x 10Tb, 60 x 5 Tb? 100 x 3 Tb? I ask because there may be some mileage in splitting the $30K into chunks i.e. you buy Seti your own drive with your name on it. Sort of harks back to the days of GPUUG when they had a shopping list you could pick from.

Gives it a more personal touch than a donation towards a grand total. Anyway I'll chuck this out as a suggestion.

300TB storage/splitting system @ $30,000

That works out at $100/Tb. I assume we are talking SSD drives here? If so what size of drive are we thinking of? 30 x 10Tb, 60 x 5 Tb? 100 x 3 Tb? I ask because there may be some mileage in splitting the $30K into chunks i.e. you buy Seti your own drive with your name on it. Sort of harks back to the days of GPUUG when they had a shopping list you could pick from.

Gives it a more personal touch than a donation towards a grand total. Anyway I'll chuck this out as a suggestion.

Now read that again, "300TB storage/splitting system @ $30,000", which is not just drives. There's the drives' enclosure/s plus what ever CPU cores are necessary to cater for it as well as all the hardware required for the splitters. There's a lot more to it than what you have read into it. ;-)

Cheers.

Now read that again, "300TB storage/splitting system @ $30,000", which is not just drives. There's the drives' enclosure/s plus what ever CPU cores are necessary to cater for it as well as all the hardware required for the splitters. There's a lot more to it than what you have read into it. ;-)

Cheers.

Yes, it's the high end CPUs and the half terabyte of RAM that get it up there. We've thought about a separate system for the CPUs and low end CPUs/small RAM in the storage box, but that adds to network costs. The system drives would be SSD, but the data drives would be plain old 10TB spinners in RAID 6 configuration. We haven't chosen which RAID cards, but they'd probably be high end LSI. I wish LSI had ported the 3ware CLI to all their cards. The LSI CLI isn't good with our monitoring automation.

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@SETIEric

Hi Eric, thanks for the detailed response. That is exactly what I was looking for. Sorry, I was late in replying but I have spent the last couple of days bringing another upgraded cruncher back online.

So would you say that the funding for the 300TB array is at the top of your wish list? Or is additional funds for the sysadmin and post-doc more important?

And to put a response to Chris's question in another post. Why haven't we developed a new wish list for the GPUUG group. The posts and traffic on that site has dropped off to nil in the past year.

Is there any mechanism in the SETI donor submission form to earmark specifically donated funds toward the drive array like we could do with the GPUUG donations?

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

I gave a little :)

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I plan to in the very near future, as a long term member active since 1999.
Ramon Noches, Colonel, United States Air Force (Retired) Team: USA

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Your first post in 18 years. Well done Sir, and thank you!

Your first post in 18 years. Well done Sir, and thank you!

Me too, as of a few days ago, here to stay now.

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+1

+2

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Hello Mr. Korpela

The situation for the participants is unacceptable. Mr. Kopella; they call for donations and calculation time. That's okay - that's what we're here for and many of us have been here for many years, donating time and money.

The circumstances to do the work for Seti are bad. We pay a significant amount of energy costs to Seti each year. We do this without ranting and volunteering for the research and for Seti.

We do not get anything for it. That's fine, too. But what we can expect is good/the best software. The clients for the seti-home calculation are inefficient! That is unacceptable. Please do your homework and provide your participants with efficient software for the different hardware. Above all, the Grafkkarten expect alternative clients significantly (x5!) More efficient than the software from your house. Thus, the output for Seti @ Home could be significantly increased in the future.

Thanks and have a nice Christmas time
Klaus Schulz

P.S.
I am from Germany and have had the text translated - sorry for the bad English