I have been on board with this SETI thing since taking an interest back in 2K3. Now I understand the nature of the whole thing and the fact that it's not the most overly funded project out there which made me want to help all the more. But seriously, since 2003 there have been more time periods when the servers that dish out and receive wu's are down more than up. My question is: how hard can it REALY be to maintain a server's operational state? And no I'm not dumb to the fact that there are always ongoing technical changes being made, but man, here we are looking for extraterrestrial intelligence and we can't keep a server running...maybe ET is avoiding us on purpose!

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... Now I understand the nature of the whole thing

Mmmm... From your recent words, I don't think you do.

and the fact that it's not the most overly funded project out there which made me want to help all the more.

Very true and very good. The lack of funding makes for a very fragile way of working. Add "experimental" and "new" and "never before done this way" and only one sysop into the equations and...

But seriously, since 2003 there have been more time periods when the servers that dish out and receive wu's are down more than up.

That is true enough for when their servers are down. However, try looking at the cricket graphs to see what proportion of time for when they are up. It is certainly a lot more than 50%!

My question is: how hard can it REALY be to maintain a server's operational state? And no I'm not dumb to the fact that there are always ongoing technical changes being made,

Take a look at what they are working with and what they are trying to do?...

A million is a BIG number, beyond most people's comprehension. Now multiply that by a thousand, and by a thousand again, and then try a few hundred questions a second randomly accessing all that lot. AT THE SAME TIME, dish out a few megabytes of data to each of half a million hosts and keep a reference so that you know what is where and what you are doing. And AT THE SAME TIME, juggle a very lively website and forums... And, AT THE SAME TIME, there's a few other mundane things to do to keep things operational, and...

but man, here we are looking for extraterrestrial intelligence and we can't keep a server running...maybe ET is avoiding us on purpose!

Fine on the wish and the impatience. If this lot was easy, then there would be more than only Berkeley (all one person of him, part time, likely 24-hours full time at the moment) doing this.

Oh, and don't try emailing him because I bet he's already got a few hundred thousand emails lost in his inbox... (It's those big numbers of people again...)


Boinc is deliberately designed so that outages like this can happen and the world continues. Boinc for the particular project then picks up from where it left off. And the world continues.


Welcome to the forums and the user RAC panics. I'm sure Berkeley are working through the latest changes and hiccups. There is a lot more there than just one little PC serving email, or a single user PC surfing the web and running anti-virus for that 'just in case bad site' scenario.

I guess funding would help, if only to fund the user fun!

Patience.

And have fun!

Keep searchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
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I have been on board with this SETI thing since taking an interest back in 2K3.

In the last FIVE years, how many Dollars have you contributed?

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I have been on board with this SETI thing since taking an interest back in 2K3.

In the last FIVE years, how many Dollars have you contributed?

Gee I don't know. let me see... considering that over that time span I have several computers run nonstop off and on for lengthy periods doing nothing but wu's for the project eating up electricity on my dime I'd have to estimate a couple hundred bucks or so. That wouldn't be far off I wouldn't think. Any more stupid questions from the peanut gallery?

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Come on people... I can't wait until our Berkeley friends get things up and running again.. but please don't get in each others hair.. :(

The BOINC platform has a queueing option, use it, it ain't there for nothin, and you will get through these sort of hiccups ;)

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The SETI@Home Gauntlet 2012 april 16 - 30| info / chat | STATS

I have been on board with this SETI thing since taking an interest back in 2K3. Now I understand the nature of the whole thing and the fact that it's not the most overly funded project out there which made me want to help all the more. But seriously, since 2003 there have been more time periods when the servers that dish out and receive wu's are down more than up. My question is: how hard can it REALY be to maintain a server's operational state? And no I'm not dumb to the fact that there are always ongoing technical changes being made, but man, here we are looking for extraterrestrial intelligence and we can't keep a server running...maybe ET is avoiding us on purpose!

I have been on board since the late 90's, & I for 1 think its a very worthwhile and underfunded area of study. I don't see you offering to assist in the running of the servers, or office, or website, or etc... The guy running this server is probably a bit more p*****d off than you are at the mo, so lets cut him some slack & let him get on with it.

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The BuddHa has spoken

Oddly enough, with the number of people participating in the project there's only one lone single man in a closet somewhere at Berkley administering the whole show... which confidently tells me that nobody else is getting up out of their chairs to offer any help either. The one thing you don't know is that I AM at least looking into dipping into my own pocket to purchase an old server to put an OS on and plug it into my electrical outlet and stick my high speed connection cable into it and let him have access to it as a backup in some form or fashion. If that was the case with all you finger pointers out there he'd have the world's largest private bank of remote servers at his disposal... but as of yet by your accounts he's still one guy in a closet with one computer, so I guess I'm not the only one not offering up to bail him out according to the popular consensus.
And I agree, I didn't start this thread to start a pissing match, I was simply stating that as independent IT professional who has many clients in several diverse fields such as medical and governmental for which I am responsible for keeping their networks up and running within the guidelines of every legal and state regulation imaginable, I just didn't see why keeping a private project like this up and running day to day should be such a major ordeal. Obviously I concede I am very, very mistaken. 'Nuff said.
Repeat for the hard of reading: 'Nuff said.

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Oddly enough, with the number of people participating in the project there's only one lone single man in a closet somewhere at Berkley...

Oddly enough, it is truly a closet.

Those pictures are a little out of date for various changes made continuously since then. They also use a couple of other rooms as a virtual "TARDIS" as far as they dare before getting complaints about noise and cables...

All interesting 'fun'.


A good way to help is to either directly donate some cash rather than just your home CPU time and electricity, or join The Planetary Society, or both!

Aside: I'm rather cautious about suffering lost time on donated old (junked for some reason) hardware. I've had too many clunkers offered/promised for various good causes (nothing to do with s@h, this is just an example,) because the owners wanted a feel-good factor for me to waste time to then just have to dispose of their electrical waste for them... (So why was whatever equipment donated for "free"? Or rather, why is it no longer wanted...?)


Happy crunchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Let me start off by saying that I am not upset with the project. But I would like to make some observations.

BOINC, and public volunteer distributed computing in general, ideally should operate like an economy. The projects should compete for the valuable, volunteered, cpu cycle resources owned by the volunteer pool. Factors which might figure into such competition are the perceived value of the project, the perceived chances of it actually doing good, the reliability of the network, and by extension, the perceived level of appreciation shown by the project to which they are donating the very valuable compute time which the project could never afford without them. They are not just spare, valueless cycles. They are cycles owned by the owners of the volunteer machines and are worth quite a lot. The users even pay for making them "not idle" on their monthy electric bills, to the tune of $100 a year or more.

SETI is *far* from the most worthy project in BOINC. I support it. But it is not head and shoulders above the others. Just another worthy cause. It was the first popular distributed computing project of its kind. It has been marketed well. It gets plugged on Nova. And has *far* more contributors than any other project that I have seen on BOINC. In fact, fully 75% of the active computers in BOINC are active contributors to Seti@home.

When any such entity, which should really have to compete for volunteers, gets into a position where it does not have to worry so much about volunteers, it should be *expected* that qualities which would contribute to a competitive edge will suffer. This might take the form of network unreliability, lack of communication during long outages, or terse messages on the website saying, basically "Yes, we know" without so much as a "We're truly sorry any inconvenience this has caused to our valuable contributors." The volunteers are, after all, collectively contributing millions of dollars worth of computing time to the project.

That said, I would encourage dissatisfied volunteers (dissatisfied is not a four letter word) to consider investigating other distributed projects which are not only underfunded, but don't even get their fair share of compute time on BOINC due to the inordinate amount of attention enjoyed by seti@home. You might just decide that you can do more good by allocating processor time to another worthy cause. It might even help seti@home in the end.

Thank you for your attention.

-Steve Bergman

Edit: There are many more projects in BOINC than are listed in the "Attach to project" dialog of the gui. See the list and statistics, here:

http://boinc.netsoft-online.com/e107_plugins/boinc/bu_rankselect.php

Martin;
My suggestion of an "old" server was founded in that an online hardware supplier that I had regularly purchased equipment from while my store was open is offering for sale dual xeon 2.2GHz based servers that I was considering loading up with memory and some healthy dives. They may be nothing spectacular by any stretch of the imagination...maybe even completely useless as far as that goes, but none the less the thought crossed my mind to pick one up, slap win serv 2k on it, stick a cable in it's ass and let her go. Whether anyone could come up with a use for it besides sitting in my basement warming my cellar spinning wu's was going to be left up to the power(s) that be. Like I say it was just a thought, it's not like I need one to benefit myself and the $200 bucks could just as easily trickle into my gas tank over the next couple weeks. Crunch on.

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... is offering for sale dual xeon 2.2GHz based servers that I was considering loading up with memory and some healthy dives. ...

If rack mounted and with oodles of fast RAM, then perhaps.

However, note that s@h are rather short of space and so must take care with their performance density.

A very good thought. Try a PM to Pappa to see if it fits in with their needs?

Happy crunchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

What would constitute an "oodle" (RAM) LOL, and what sort of capacity would be needed drive wise to even begin to hold anything in enough to matter? I will have to see if the thing even qualifies or it would be a wasted effort. I know the one I was looking at supports up to 12GB ECC pc2100 ram, but I believe they tap out at 4x 36gb 15k-rpm scsi drives though...140gb of storage might not be enough to hold the emperor's grapes, though yes they are rack mount jobs.

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I walked past the SETI rack a few years ago,

It was pretty small and unimpressive, but apparently it is efficient. I don't remember it being in a closet then. Maybe it was near a closet and out for maintenance.

Word has it we have numerous signals but they are not being analyzed. I think that bugs me most of all.

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"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss

Also consider this SSD with read speed of 230 megabytes per second and write speed of 170 megabytes of second. It should give some nice performance boost, shouldn't it?

No HDD can achieve even 150 MB/s at the moment. Right?

Henri.

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Manned mission to Mars in 2019 Petition <-- Sign this, please.

Also consider this SSD with read speed of 230 megabytes per second and write speed of 170 megabytes of second.

Intel X25-E is even better: 250 MB/s (read) and 170 MB/s (write)! Read latency is only 75 microseconds. Random 4KB Reads: >35,000 IOPS. Random 4KB Writes: >3,300 IOPS.

How much would a drive like this reduce the server load?

Henri.

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