i agree with paul, i now devote less of my resources towards SETI, my main projects are (in rough order) CPDN, rosetta, LHC, Einstein
the first 3 getting the vast majority.

but then there are quite a few "seti only" cunchers out there, so i'd say people like myself, paul, and others have only a very small impact, if any at all

With BOINC, well, I now have a fairly wide variety of projects I can participate in that are doing more serious science. As such, well, I have downgraded participation in SETI@Home. It is very possible that with BOINC, there are now other projects and some small percentage of the people that are doing BOINC, came from SETI@Home, but for this reason may have moved to doing only other projects.

I don't know that the percentage is small... I ran RC5, then SETI "Classic", just as background noise; was never really interested in "what it was doing or how it worked", just figured my unused CPU cycles might as well be used for something. Tried BOINC when it was CLI-only on the Mac, said forget it, went back to Classic. Finally tried BOINC again last summer, put all the computers on SETI, picked Einstein as a "backup", and was about to go back to the "leave it alone and let it run" mode. Somewhere in there I got "hooked" on BOINC and actually started looking at what the other projects were doing. Now only the iBooks that I can't easily mess with are still running SETI (except when I play with optimized apps or something), and all my other resources are going to "real science" projects, based on the two factors of a) they're doing something I find interesting, and b) are a "well run" project.

I'm a SF fan, support the goals of SETI, and find SETI/BOINC a great computer science project to play around with - but the _other_ BOINC projects need my CPU cycles more. There's more than enough power here already, while other, possibly "more worthwhile" projects are still hungry. Rosetta, just for one example, is getting most of the big "farms" that had been on FindADrug, but are still only somewhere around 10% of what they'd _like_ to have. They're still in the "startup" stages, not quite ready for the "set and forget" crowd, but anyone who's willing to keep even some minimal watch on what's going on can _really_ contribute a lot there right now.

Question, I notice that the rate of participation has decreased significantly over the past 2 years. Would you guess this is a factor of other project being added, users changing to BOINC, or some other factor?

One other factor that may have come into play is user desire.

For example, I had no luck running GIMPS or CPDN in their early days. Don't know why, but, my computers were always on, high quality, and not over-clocked. Yet, I could not keep the applications from crashing. So, I did SETI@Home to the tune of 61K+ work units.

With BOINC, well, I now have a fairly wide variety of projects I can participate in that are doing more serious science. As such, well, I have downgraded participation in SETI@Home. It is very possible that with BOINC, there are now other projects and some small percentage of the people that are doing BOINC, came from SETI@Home, but for this reason may have moved to doing only other projects.

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To all:

I am researching project SETI for a whitepaper. I am trying to locate the total number of active users and hosts from 1999 - today. Optimally, the information could be as of year-end.

Don't know if you can get active hosts from anywhere, but active users atleast is here

Thank you. This URL: http://seticlassic.ssl.berkeley.edu/numusers.html was very helpful. Question, I notice that the rate of participation has decreased significantly over the past 2 years. Would you guess this is a factor of other project being added, users changing to BOINC, or some other factor? I know these questions are difficult to answer b/c the numbers were probably not tracked early on or the tracking calculation has changed.

Regards,

John Lee

I would say BOINC was the major factor, as the rate of reduction of classic, and rate of increase for boinc were about the same from when BOINC was publicly announced onwards to the demise of classic

To all:

I am researching project SETI for a whitepaper. I am trying to locate the total number of active users and hosts from 1999 - today. Optimally, the information could be as of year-end.

Does anyone have any idea where I could locate this historical information. At this time, I am not in need of total WU data, as that is currently displayed on BOINCSTATS.

Regards,

John Lee

John, you might be able to deduce some hosts data from CPU-years/day but no exact figures are published (as far as i know, but UCB might have some data)

when you say that total WU data is on boincstats, what do you mean exactly? boincstats only deals with credit, which is a result of WU's processed, but credit is a multiple of number of WUs and time taken, so it's impossible to calculate the "correct" number of WUs from that (due to many possible answers, unless you use an average time/WU value, but that's not exact)

as has been said in some of your other threads, you would be best to contact Dr David Anderson at UCB to discuss your requirements if you're planning a benificial side-project for seti or boinc in general, and i'm sure he'd be happy to help
i'm sure he could arrange things like adding XML output for users results (which would be benificial for SETI/UCB too), although you'll need to take into account that you can only view the combined results of all hosts for the currently logged in user, for example if you try to view my results you'll get a "no access" message, so this can't be done "generically" as a normal web request, unless maybe you use Web RPCs, but maybe this needs to be addressed by UCB

you can, however, request results for any host, even if no user is logged in, and you might be able to use the link from "owner" to assign multiple hosts back to the user account of the owner if you need this, however for "annonomous" (spelling?) hosts this will be a problem, because they're owned by users who don't wish to have their hosts displayed on the website (don't know why they'd want this thou)

Even though SETI users leave, every year, strong and faster processors appear, and they basicly take the part that the people that left had....

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We need to crunch a lot more workunits, orders of magnitude more. Any aliens out there will probably have their transmitters off most of the time, and when they are on, (if they have a beamwidth of 1/10 degree like that of the receiver at Arecibo) the likelihood that the beam would be pointed at us is only one in 5,000,000. One is not going to get much of a story by looking at each spot for only 107 seconds each one to six years.

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Thank you for the information. I will read the whitepaper.

Regards,

John

... perhaps I had missed the real success of the project-- the building of the largest virtual supercomputer in the world which can now be used on other projects.

I guess this falls under he category of unintended consequences/results.
...

You might reread the original 1997 SETI@Home paper. The distributed computing goals may have been exceeded, but can hardly be called unintended.

                                               Joe

---

John R. Lee, Jr.
Akuratus Corporation, CEO

... perhaps I had missed the real success of the project-- the building of the largest virtual supercomputer in the world which can now be used on other projects.

I guess this falls under he category of unintended consequences/results.
...

You might reread the original 1997 SETI@Home paper. The distributed computing goals may have been exceeded, but can hardly be called unintended.

                                               Joe

Thank you all for our comments and suggestions.

I, too am disappointed that SETI has not found any signal of interest, but I discovered that perhaps I had missed the real success of the project-- the building of the largest virtual supercomputer in the world which can now be used on other projects.

I guess this falls under he category of unintended consequences/results.

I encourage everyone to continue supporting BOINC (and SETI) and give thought to diversifying their CPU time among other projects.

That is the real success of the project. Nobody should be disappointed IMO.

Regards,

John

P.S. Let’s not forget that the Drake Equation and Fermi’s Paradox still demonstrates mathematically that there is life in the universe—so let’s not give up!

---

John R. Lee, Jr.
Akuratus Corporation, CEO

Another thing that caused a number of active users to start dropping out and move on to other projects two years ago was the analysis of the results for the first half of the project data. It showed no real promising signals had been detected and that at the levels being received, none likely. This resulted in a drop in interest in the project by both users, the Berkeley staff and backers providing the funding.

In addition, many of the older users were, well older. People who had grown up or worked in the early years of the space program, and time was taking a toll on their ability to participate as well as them.

To all:

I am researching project SETI for a whitepaper. I am trying to locate the total number of active users and hosts from 1999 - today. Optimally, the information could be as of year-end.

Does anyone have any idea where I could locate this historical information. At this time, I am not in need of total WU data, as that is currently displayed on BOINCSTATS.

Regards,

John Lee

I looked over at the Classic site and saw that the total number of users was 5,436,301 there. This total reflects everybody that had connected to Classic during the 6.6 years they were able to, until that privilege was stopped recently. In other words that number of Classic users is frozen there. Well over 1/3 of that number hadn't even turned in a single result. Also that number include many, many duplicates, intended or not. As far as active users at Classic is concerned, that graph hadn't been updated in about a week and so the number now is much less than the 190,000 indicated, and is dropping like a rock. In less than four weeks the number of Classic actives will be zero because to be active one had to have turned a unit in the past 28 days and that will be impossible because the receiving server there had been turned off forever. For SetiBoinc users/actives it'll be necessary to find the appropriate pages. The Wiki is probably the first place to search.

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Just my personal experience and observations:

The SETI project has had 'usability' problems throughout its lifetime. When it is difficult to get workunits the users have deserted the project. Sometime about two years ago I myself gave up on SETI and quit actively running it. When BOINC first came online I went back to running SETI stuff. And, since there are now other projects, I'm more inclined to run whatever I can whether it's SETI or something else (excepting CPDN which I think is total nonsense).

I am disappointed that SETI hasn't found anything although I guess one wouldn't really expect to. I do think some of the other projects are more likely to produce significant results in the short term - like Predictor@H, Rosetta@H and Einstein@H.

To all:

I am researching project SETI for a whitepaper. I am trying to locate the total number of active users and hosts from 1999 - today. Optimally, the information could be as of year-end.

Don't know if you can get active hosts from anywhere, but active users atleast is here

Thank you. This URL: http://seticlassic.ssl.berkeley.edu/numusers.html was very helpful. Question, I notice that the rate of participation has decreased significantly over the past 2 years. Would you guess this is a factor of other project being added, users changing to BOINC, or some other factor? I know these questions are difficult to answer b/c the numbers were probably not tracked early on or the tracking calculation has changed.

Regards,

John Lee

I should think BOINC was a major contripting factor, with new users signing for BOINC as well as move-overs.
Additionally, Folding@Home became a very popular DC project, with a large upsurge in users late in 2003.

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To all:

I am researching project SETI for a whitepaper. I am trying to locate the total number of active users and hosts from 1999 - today. Optimally, the information could be as of year-end.

Don't know if you can get active hosts from anywhere, but active users atleast is here

Thank you. This URL: http://seticlassic.ssl.berkeley.edu/numusers.html was very helpful. Question, I notice that the rate of participation has decreased significantly over the past 2 years. Would you guess this is a factor of other project being added, users changing to BOINC, or some other factor? I know these questions are difficult to answer b/c the numbers were probably not tracked early on or the tracking calculation has changed.

Regards,

John Lee

To all:

I am researching project SETI for a whitepaper. I am trying to locate the total number of active users and hosts from 1999 - today. Optimally, the information could be as of year-end.

Does anyone have any idea where I could locate this historical information. At this time, I am not in need of total WU data, as that is currently displayed on BOINCSTATS.

Regards,

John Lee

That would depend on how you define "active user". SETI Classic defined it as anyone who returned a workunit in the last four weeks. However, earlier in the project it was defined as anyone who returned a workunit in a shorter period of time. I forget what it was. SETI BOINC defines "active user" as anyone who has returned a result within the last two weeks. Do you mean how many people have contributed at least one result?

To all:

I am researching project SETI for a whitepaper. I am trying to locate the total number of active users and hosts from 1999 - today. Optimally, the information could be as of year-end.

Don't know if you can get active hosts from anywhere, but active users atleast is here

Don't know if this is what you're looking for, but you can go from HERE to get Classic users grouped by sign up date and other info. At least it's a place to start.



Good luck on your paper.
Happy Crunching!

---

To all:

I am researching project SETI for a whitepaper. I am trying to locate the total number of active users and hosts from 1999 - today. Optimally, the information could be as of year-end.

Does anyone have any idea where I could locate this historical information. At this time, I am not in need of total WU data, as that is currently displayed on BOINCSTATS.

Regards,

John Lee