The servers that will be bought, how much are they and will more help?

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Don't sweat it guys. We are all aware that this is pretty much an unpaid job.

Take as long as you need to do whatever needs to be done. I for one will be paitently waiting.

Good work and good luck.

My 2 cents . . .

I am an (long time)EX- SETI user. When all these problems started (with regularity ) about a month ago I left, and now my two computers are crunching numbers for other BOINC projects.

Well I just thought I’d POP IN to see how well things were going ( and to TRY to get my completed SETI WORK UNITS that I STILL HAVE, to upload) . . . and for me, I felt I made the correct decision to move on to other projects . .
Just one more thing . . . something I learned working in the US Army . . . Signal Branch,

“The effective range on an excuse is . . . . ZERO Meters”

PS: ET, if you’re out there, PICK UP THE DAMN PHONE, before these guys go nutz !

As you already decided to leave please don't feel fee to comment here again.

Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

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My computer is very patient.

Happy festive season to all from the other side of the planet.

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The servers that will be bought, how much are they and will more help?

I've read in another thread that they won't help much until they have a faster connection to the main internet connection for the campus, and for some reason, that faster connection must be installed underground.

Thanks for the heads up.
My computer (poor as it is) and I (likewise) will be here, ready and waiting! :)

http://seti.berkeley.edu/
SEVENDIP (optical Seti)
IR Excess
SERENDIP (wide band radio Seti)
CASPER
Already in progress.

Only the first of these links is valid, but it goes to a page with valid links for the others.
[/quote]

Are there any plans to add processing from these projects to BOINC? (Or are they already on the list, and I missed them?)
[/url]

My 2 cents . . .

I am an (long time) EX-SETI user. When all these problems started (with regularity) about a month ago I left, and now my two computers are crunching numbers for other BOINC projects.

No, you are a long-time Seti member who LEFT when the recent troubles started.

I am the Senior Network admin, for a medium sized international company, working out of Europe. ......

Here is an easy way for non-network types to understand it. Suppose you live near a forest. One day you chop down some tress, on your own, pull up the stumps, on your own, fill in the holes and level it off by hand. By using that road you save 30 min off a trip into town. All is good. You tell a few friends about the road and they start to use it was well. With the increased usage the pothole get bigger and road gets rougher and needs more repair. But you feel you’re doing a good thing so you keep making the repairs. Occasionally some one shows up with a shovel, and helps, but mostly your on your own. Pretty soon everyone wants you use your road. Pot holes must be filled in hourly, mud holes show up that must be filled in, and soon there is a two hour wait juts to get on your now, totally over used, totally tore up road. What can you do?? You can can’t build a new road, no money, you can’t hire someone to fix the road 24/7, no money. You simply tell the users to wait and be patient , that you’re working on, when you can.

Again . . . IMHO wouldn’t it make more sense to limit the load on a network to what it can handle, and keep it up and running, rather than over loading a pieced together network, to the point where it is not running at all.

And as a Senior Network Admin, you know that the only way to do that is to limit the number of participants and/or the number of computers they can attach to the project. This being a University-hosted research project, you CANNOT charge an enrollment fee (Toll Road, to use your analogy). So how do Dr. W and Eric determine who to force out and who to limit access to? Drop loyal, long-term members with older computers or Operating Systems? Limit all members to no more than, say, 4 computers and 4 GPUs? That will hurt some of the most productive, and most loyal, members.

Too bad you are not located in California. If you really wanted to help the project, you could volunteer your services. Maybe you could even get a tax deduction for it.

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Donald
Infernal Optimist / Submariner, retired

Are there any plans to add processing from these projects to BOINC? (Or are they already on the list, and I missed them?)

You would need to ask the people running those projects that question.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Scheduler crashes have continued, so we'll be down until we've isolated and solved the problem.

I, for one, will patiently wait. Thank you for what you do!

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Darn! I've got this XPS 8300 with a Pentium Quad running at 2 Gig. It has already crunched all tasks it downloaded just before you went down Friday. Now it's just sitting here trying to upload, and download, so that It can crunch more. The only problem I'm having is the darned timeout when the computer goes to sleep. (:>)

For some reason I haven't noticed any problems with up/download of tasks..
Just returned 5 completed tasks or so and got new ones to crunch, so all is well and the search continues :)

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All 4 tasks that were queued to report last night have been sent and there are currently 2 running and 4 waiting to run. I only have a dual core Eee on the job so it will take a little while. Good to see you are up and running again.

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We are a land of sheep and dairy
Here to be fleeced and milked

Thanks for the heads up!

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At times like this we should all ask ourselves, "What would J.C. do?".

(no, not that one.... Jeff Cobb.)

I too am a C.T.O. to a bank here in toronto. Knowing what I know about seti, instead of complaining I made a $500 donation just in case they need some new hardware. I always thought europeans were more compassionate. You guys are doing a great job and hope this helps out.

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I too am a C.T.O. to a bank here in toronto. Knowing what I know about seti, instead of complaining I made a $500 donation just in case they need some new hardware. I always thought europeans were more compassionate. You guys are doing a great job and hope this helps out.

Thank you!

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I didnt realize how much in need you guys were of funds. This incident gave me a wakeup call. I aint a rich man, but I can do my part and part with $50

Let's all understand something here.
We all may think that we know how to run the project better - want them to open up all the source code and details so that we can "fix" them.
But - there is the rub. For every great programmer - there are MANY wanna be programmers that will give their suggestions.

Simple suggestion - a new PRIVATE thread to the admins - if you want to volunteer your services - state your credentials - and KNOW that you will not have ANY say (and that is how it SHOULD be).

For myself - willing to help how I may. 20 years AF experience as a tech controller - and now a geek. Not an expert - but I think outside the box (a lot of the time because I don't know any better).

For this project - the scheduler has been the issue - bandwidth - who cares - so - you get your downloads slow - but you GET them if the scheduler isn't crammed.

Solutions are many. Bigger work units. Larger queues again with a SET mandatory cool down (half queue until the workstation can try to contact the server). I also see some systems out there with literally thousands of WU each - and tons of errors because of timeouts - what's up with that????

Seem to be getting WU pretty good right now - but systems are set crazy - WHY - when I have 2 completed workunits out of 200 - am I contacting the server for more work??????? AGAIN - PLEASE - set - if possible - a MANDATORY COOL DOWN - half queue - and OPEN THE QUEUE. Let me have 5 days of work - and - you won't hear a PEEP for 2 and a half days. That should ease the congestion on the scheduler. Once again - slow downloads - don't matter.

Finally - wondering...why..I download faster and more reliably STILL from a proxy server. Baffling. You use a Linux architecture - Linux boxes, Apple boxes haven't had much trouble. Proxy servers are likely running Apache (again...same TCP/IP stack). What's with windoooooows? ECN? Congestion notification has seemed to make some difference here - maybe about as reliable as my proxy - may be something to look into.

Ya'll do what you do - and I respect you for it. However - please - it is REALLY nonsensical for my systems to be requesting workunits when they are essentially 99 or 98 percent FULL. Again - a mandatory cooldown would work wonders - bandwidth be damned.

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While I love SETI, I don't mind downtime, as it just give World Community Grid more CPU cycles! I appreciate all that the SETI folks have done, and wish I was in a place to continue $$ support, but do have an idea I can afford to give!

As an only occasional visitor here, please forgive me if this has been considered but rejected...

It seems that some cloud provider would have some spare CPU cycles / bandwidth they could parse out to SETI without impacting paying customers, but could still legitimately be a tax write-off. Since much a SETI processing does not have to be real-time, off-peak processing would be fine. The bandwidth needed, while a significant added load to a University network, could possibly go basically unnoticed on some cloud networks (think Berkeley vs Google or Amazon).

There may be some issues in virtualizing the systems (they are Sun servers, yes?) but it seems that there must be an option...?

Has this been considered? Not feasible? No cloud providers willing?
What would it take to make this happen?

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