And there's another very good point, Internet and Bandwidth charges, do they take SETI enhanced into account? Bandwidth should drop to probably one quarter of the current figure. Is that 'budget' figure for last years use, or this years predicted use?

Maybe overlooking something, but Cogent delivers "flat-rate" and only seems to have 500kbits, 100Mbits and 1Gbits, meaning it doesn't matter if SETI@Home uses 1 Mbits or 99 Mbits, they'll still pay for the full 100 Mbits...


Would the bandwidth-usage drop so low that could start paying UC Berkeley instead? Well, possibly, but if they by a "lucky" stroke splits only VHAR-wu for some time, the bandwith-usage will probably jump to 50 Mbits or something, and next time a new seti-application is released they'll likely hit 90+ Mbits...

Not to forget, any recover after outage will likely take longer than before, since SETI@Home doesn't have the money to pay for bandwith.


Oh, and atleast back in BOINC beta-testing, last saw an Astropulse-wu it was 1 MB and took roughly 2x as long as a seti-wu to crunch... meaning Astropulse will possibly use more bandwith than SETI@Home is using to-day...

Seti I, Seti II are just terms to be interpreted. Perhaps Seti I is the thing we call Seti/Boinc and Seti II is Enhanced. Instead of Seti I being Classic and Seti II being Seti/Boinc.

Atleast when it comes to the budget-page, it seems to be fairly clear:

SETI@Home I == 1-beam Arecibo-recorder.
SETI@Home II == 7-beam Arecibo-recorder not yet installed.


Now, according to Current Progress, there's basically 5 step, step 1-3 is record data, crunch it, validate.

Step 4 and 5 is "Remove Radio Interference" and "Identify Final Candidates". Since didn't have enough database-power, neither of these could be done "real-time", and in "classic" neither was actually step 3, validation.

If not mistaken, step 1-3 is by now finished, except for the last few tapes SETI@Home/BOINC is currently crunching.

Step 4 and 5 on the other hand is AFAIK only finished 2 years or something, atleast everything done after the reobservation in March 2003 is likely still to be processed, and is therefore likely the reason for these to show-up in the budget...

As for why it costs so much, no idea.

There's a world of difference - to me at least - between 11 thou and 750 thou.

It seems intuitively obvious that the difference is in the other sources: in past years SETI was funded at certain levels by The Planetary Society, and others, with SETI participants adding to that.

If that funding is over, then they have to seek other sources -- other grants, and more from participants.

If everyone kicked in $1.83, that'd do it.

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Too many things to clarify, but here's a short history of our funding:

When I first started working on the SETI project (circa 1997) it was basically just Dan, Jeff, and me, with occasional students. There was absolutely no funding outside of private donations and help from TPS and the SETI Institute, and none of us actually "worked" full time on the project (i.e. we didn't get paid full time). Even back then Sun was good about donating necessary hardware.

David started developing SETI@home for free. When it became viable is nicely coincided with the dot com boom so various companies were more willing to donate cash and hardware, and the university was more willing to match these funds. This carried us through the heart of SETI@home classic, though just barely.

NSF/NASA does not support SETI projects. Case closed. However, NSF will support instrumentation developed by Dan which could be used for SETI data collection as well as other non-SETI projects. So there are scant bit of funds there to work on the data recorder, etc. NSF is also pleased with BOINC and is funding that, as it is useful in so many fields of science and beyond.

But the dot coms disappeared years ago, as did the university matching money. Proposals are continually being drafted to various funding organizations, but to little avail. The current political climate has been terrible for science in general, and SETI has always gotten to short end of the stick to begin with. So that's where we're at.

- Matt

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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

Tony -- aka -- mmciastro --- Wrote the following:

<snipped>

I don't know what they spend it on, or exactly how it's spent.

<snipped>

hi Tony:

here ya go:


SETI@home Budget

LOL difficult to decide where to post this link, so many to choose from. Just a fun note you understand guys!

With the funding we expect these chairs at Berkeley for the equivalent of this when the WU queue runs dry :-))

http://msexp.streamnavig.com/msexp/player_extract.asp?e=E9999&s=9999_en_xw&f=9999_ en&uid=00000000&lng=uk&cou=uk

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LOL difficult to decide where to post this link, so many to choose from. Just a fun note you understand guys!

With the funding we expect these chairs at Berkeley for the equivalent of this when the WU queue runs dry :-))

http://msexp.streamnavig.com/msexp/player_extract.asp?e=E9999&s=9999_en_xw&f=9999_ en&uid=00000000&lng=uk&cou=uk

Hilarious!!!

If only it were real. It would bring out the Sadist in all of us. I quite liked the little touch of including a Professor Sacher Masoch.



"Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering."-Arthur C Clarke

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Join TeamACC

Sometimes I think we are alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we are not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

There actually have been some requests for money donations in the past year or so, as Matt has posted the link to the donation site several times, specially when people, after some long outages, have asked for the possibility to donate money for the devs to spend on some more stable and better hardware. This made me create the Donation threads for people, who want to donate, to get easy access to the donation site.

But Matt hasn't been so direct in his answers before, but I think they hit the bottom moneywise and had to decide to campaign for money donations in a more visible way, as the options are to get some money or close the shop.

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"I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me

My original question still stands - why is this 750,000 needed, what will it be spent on, and when will there be some results. To me it doesn't seem much to ask for that information and pledge from Berkeley to keep us better informed.

That information is already published.
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_budget.php

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me@rescam.org