I have a SUN workstation running 24/7 since January 2008. I always respected the SUN hardware before it became Oracle.
Tullio

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Thank you Eric!!!!!
I will always crunch what is sent to me.

Exactly. There is data that needs to be processed. So processed it shall be! Maybe some data needs to be sent out again. I don't see any issue with that. They know what they need processed & if I can help crunch some of it I will.

I suppose increasing the minimum quorum could be used if they wanted to have more results with the same data. Depending on how closely the apps look at the data chunks. I could see requiring 3 or 4 results as still be scientifically legitimate, & not considered "busy work".

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

I suppose increasing the minimum quorum could be used if they wanted to have more results with the same data. Depending on how closely the apps look at the data chunks. I could see requiring 3 or 4 results as still be scientifically legitimate, & not considered "busy work".

Especially to combat those situations where two GPUs get paired up together and spew out -9 overflows when it shouldn't have been a -9 overflow WU. I know that situation isn't frequent, but it also isn't uncommon/rare.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

I suppose increasing the minimum quorum could be used if they wanted to have more results with the same data. Depending on how closely the apps look at the data chunks. I could see requiring 3 or 4 results as still be scientifically legitimate, & not considered "busy work".

Especially to combat those situations where two GPUs get paired up together and spew out -9 overflows when it shouldn't have been a -9 overflow WU. I know that situation isn't frequent, but it also isn't uncommon/rare.

I think to fix that extra code would have to be added to keep all of the results going to the same kind of hardware. I don't think having 3 or 4 GPUs spit out a false -9 overflow would be very helpful.
Perhaps a mechanism that sends out overflow results for 2nd round of crunching or something along those lines.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

My total municipal utility bill, for water, wastewater, electricity, and currently a surcharge for the new recycling bins they "gave" everybody, averages around $100/month. I don't know how much of that is attributable to crunching and the associated air conditioning. I keep my crunchers in the basement where it's fairly cool all the time, so I really don't know if they need much cooling or if they contribute to heating in the winter. My "farm," such as it is, is only two boxes and one of those only crunches on its GPU.

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I took the comment about Angela forcing Eric to post an update as being exaggerated for humor.

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On the assumption that the replacement for bruno won't come any sooner than tomorrow's outage, I'm going to let my phone and tablet have another pair each of Main tasks... if they can get any!

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David
Sitting on my butt while others boldly go,
Waiting for a message from a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

]
Exactly. There is data that needs to be processed. So processed it shall be! Maybe some data needs to be sent out again. I don't see any issue with that. They know what they need processed & if I can help crunch some of it I will.

And we've both been around long enough for you to know I feel the same way.

What I *wish* we could do (and I don't even know that there is a way to do it) is fund the project at a level where we were reprocessing and re-looking at data because the code was constantly being improved and the search made more sensitive.

I'm not even opposed to looking through data gathered by other projects.

It would be nice to know if there was any result (even a null), but you know, the state of affairs is what it is and I think we all accept that even if we don't much like it.

If I remember correctly, part of what the AstroPulse work was doing was helping Eric with a "hydrogen survey" that has far-reaching implications not only for SETI but for many disciplines in more traditional Astronomy and Astrophysics. I would like to think our contribution would be helping Eric with his interstellar medium work even if we never find an alien.

The only way someone could interpret my comment about the cost of doing this as some form of rejection of the project or dissatisfaction with the progress of science is if they just needed an excuse to fuss and a target to fuss-at.

Eric has explained this, so there's no need to re-re-re-state what has already been said. MY only clarifying comment would be that it is cheaper for you, me, the planet, Berkeley, the project, and everyone else concerned if things like: For lack of $10,000 we didn't have an adequate database backup. It's cheaper to *provide* that $10,000 than to spend $100,000 re-crunching that data that wasn't backed-up.

Now everybody reading along needs to give me a break: I don't know that the situation I just described happened. It's a hypothetical example and if you don't know what a hypothetical example is, please look-it-up.

As far as I know, there has been no request for an infrastructure improvement of the backup database sort, nor do I know if it's desired, or needed, or if any amount of money would prevent that sort of trouble. I do know that the last time we were asked to raise funds to support a hardware acquisition it took about a day to raise the 100% of the necessary funds. The willingness is there.

Spending $10,000 instead of $100,000 is common sense and it isn't a reflection on any person, or people, or committee. Well, it may be a reflection on me. I spend the money I spend crunching instead of sending it as a tax-deductible contribution to Berkeley.

On a dollar-for-dollar basis, the most efficient use of my funds would be at the project's source. Unfortunately, a $6,000 donation would be such a small, small drop in the bucket that it wouldn't make a difference to them while being a very significant sacrifice for me.

My personal philosophy about giving away money prevents me from dropping any significant amount in a bucket that I don't know for a metaphysical certainty will get full and be put to the intended use. ...for the same reason I wouldn't bother trying to put out a raging house fire with a $2.00 one liter bottle of water. I might as well throw the $2.00 on the fire. Better still, I could do neither and save the $2.00.

Some of that's personal experience and local, where I've given money to an organization that I saw just throw it down the drain because some rah-rah committee-person spent "other people's money" with no respect for it at all; governments do it all the time, and sadly universities do it while screaming that they are under-funded. I am NOT accusing SETI@Home of doing that; just explaining where my "feelings" come from.

It never dawned on me that saying it is a huge waste of money to do the SAME analysis twice (no matter why) would be interpreted as my saying we can't look at the same data twice (analyzing it for different things) or that my saying we can raise some money to pay for shipping disks rather than do stuff that doesn't need to be done would be interpreted the way it was.

It's really pretty funny that I'd tell Eric that if he needs shipping money we'll get it to him (that it's less than a drop in the bucket compared to processing costs) and somehow that's seen as a complaint.

It's also pretty ironic that as I disclose my personal cost of participating we'd have server processes go haywire and my personal costs would be reduced to zero.

I took the comment about Angela forcing Eric to post an update as being exaggerated for humor.

Of course it was. In fact, it was a follow-on to a comment Eric made some time ago about Angela prodding him to post something. So the comment was a little "inside joke" for people who remembered Eric's comment. And I smiley-faced behind it just to be sure everyone knew it was a "tease."

I was commenting as though I was a long-time friend and "playing."

The warped reception that comment got (and you don't know the half of it) reminded me why I don't post as much in public as I used-to. Walking on eggshells and needing to use my "professional voice" when engaged in my hobby just wears me out. I have a hobby to get away from having to be "professional" and watch everything I say as if on the witness stand.

Thank's Angela for giving Eric a little pook hehehehe , and Thanks again Eric for the updates .

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Hello all,
I may have missed where to find the post about stats not being updated, but I have noticed for 4 - 5 ish days I am crunching data and Bonic stats and Free-DC have not shown any changes.

I hope this will be fixed soon. No intent to push on anyone, I just did not see a notice.

Thanks for your effort Eric K!
Royce

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Hello all,
I may have missed where to find the post about stats not being updated, but I have noticed for 4 - 5 ish days I am crunching data and Bonic stats and Free-DC have not shown any changes.

I hope this will be fixed soon. No intent to push on anyone, I just did not see a notice.

Thanks for your effort Eric K!
Royce

For the record: $25 a month for electricity for my 2 computers running only GPU units, not including estimated AC costs. Not including hardware costs (recent upgrades). 600 watt PS (GTX480)- AMD 4 core and a 1000 Watt PS (GTX970) AMD 8 core FX.

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I suppose increasing the minimum quorum could be used if they wanted to have more results with the same data. Depending on how closely the apps look at the data chunks. I could see requiring 3 or 4 results as still be scientifically legitimate, & not considered "busy work".

Especially to combat those situations where two GPUs get paired up together and spew out -9 overflows when it shouldn't have been a -9 overflow WU. I know that situation isn't frequent, but it also isn't uncommon/rare.

I think to fix that extra code would have to be added to keep all of the results going to the same kind of hardware. I don't think having 3 or 4 GPUs spit out a false -9 overflow would be very helpful.
Perhaps a mechanism that sends out overflow results for 2nd round of crunching or something along those lines.

t

yep,it will prevent such type of errors. But will increase inconclusives rate ultimately. Same hardware tends to round results in the same way. But that way is different between types of hardware. Hence, with your proposal, more results rounded differently will be paired agains each other. And it will increase rate of inconclusives with additional task issued to resolve inconclusive.
There are always some signals too close to threshold to feel even slightest difference in rounding.

You talk about the "increasing the minimum quorum" and "keep all of the results going to the same kind of hardware" effect.

But what about "a mechanism that sends out overflow results for 2nd round of crunching"?
I understand this as:
If validator have 2 "overflow results" ('initial replication') and they match - do not mark the WU as valid - instead send 3-rd task to check is that real or false overflow

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- ALF - "Find out what you don't do well ..... then don't do it!" :)
 

The only way someone could interpret my comment about the cost of doing this as some form of rejection of the project or dissatisfaction with the progress of science is if they just needed an excuse to fuss and a target to fuss-at.

That isn't the only way. Certainly I took the rather ambiguous wording you used differently than you intended, but it wasn't a malicious attempt to fuss and focus on fussing at you. From my reading, it simply didn't make sense initially.

Wow, so many wasted words.

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Since everyone is so crazy about money, maybe we should look at money.

http://www.naic.edu/~astro/NSFSR/statement.html wrote:

The observatory operates with a staff of about 125 and a yearly budget of about $12M

Assumption, or wild guess, Seti is on 50% of the time.
There are 7 feed horns, and each produces 2 polarizations.
Each work unit is about 110 seconds of data.
To make sure that a Gaussian that would cross a time slice is detected, there has to an overlapping unit that splits the time slice created.

There are 31536000 seconds in a year. That would be 286690 work unit slices. However due to the overlap we generate twice that many or 573380 slices. There are 14 channels or 8027320 possible work units a year. We have assumed 1/2 of them are not recorded due to maintenance projects at the dish. That gives us 4013660 possible work units. With the $12M budget that results in a cost per work unit of $2.99 per work unit for telescope time.

We (Seti & Crunchers) are glad someone else is paying that REAL cost. I can just imagine say Nez having to buy work units to process at $2.99/each!

Conclusion: Our donations of computer processing and electricity are very important, but by far they are not the largest cost associated with the project. I haven't run the numbers but I doubt if the cost to crunch a work unit is much above $0.01/each. So if we ran each work unit a dozen ways from Sunday trying to extract a signal, compared to the cost of getting that work unit, it is money well spent.

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Guess I should have noted that I did not care about my cost. Just wanted to post my real world costs less hardware.

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5. Will we run out of data? It depends upon what you mean by that. We may run out of SETI@home data taken by the current data recorder, although there is still plenty of Astropulse data to process. Jeff is prioritizing the GBT data splitter, so we hope to have that on line before too long. It will also be the starting point for the next thing, which will be to use SERENDIP VI as a data recorder. It should be capable of much higher data rates (GBps) than the current recorder, and therefore much higher bandwidths. It should also give us our first taste of the 327MHz Sky Survey data.

Hope that answers some of your questions.

Just a few items for the wish list.
One would think there would be years of Arecibo Data that hasn't been analyzed with AstroPulse. Now that we have a much more efficient AP App, has there been any thought into running that data after the 'current' AP data is exhausted? It seems the AP splitters spend about half their time waiting for the MB data to finish being split. If the older data could be made available to the AP splitters while waiting on the MB data to finish it might speed things up greatly.

It's my understanding Arecibo can't access most of the newly discovered Exoplanets whereas the GBT can. Any idea on how long 'before too long' will be? One would think having data available to work on Exoplanets would be very attractive to a number of people. It will certainly be high on my list.

It's my understanding Arecibo can't access most of the newly discovered Exoplanets whereas the GBT can. Any idea on how long 'before too long' will be? One would think having data available to work on Exoplanets would be very attractive to a number of people. It will certainly be high on my list.

[/quote]

Which ones? The ones in the Goldilocks zone, or all of them?

Would anyone give a priority to an exoplanet outside the GLZ over a wider ranging area?

Guess it's swings and roundabouts, but I don't believe an exoplanet signal search is the answer to the main question of are we alone or not:-)

Regards,

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Cliff,
Been there, Done that, Still no damm T shirt!

Most of them. Unless things have changed since I build the last Exoplanet database for Starry Night Pro, a large number of Exoplanets are grouped too 'high' to be in Arecibo's range. I believe someone here also mentioned it. They also mentioned studying the planets would be of interest to SETI. I was so interested in it I spent days compiling a database that works in Starry Night Pro and submitted it. I just looked, it's still available at Starry Night if you know where to look... Extra-Solar Planets Checkout the top of the .txt file.
Hmmm, it's already been almost three years, might be time to build another.

You talk about the "increasing the minimum quorum" and "keep all of the results going to the same kind of hardware" effect.

But what about "a mechanism that sends out overflow results for 2nd round of crunching"?
I understand this as:
If validator have 2 "overflow results" ('initial replication') and they match - do not mark the WU as valid - instead send 3-rd task to check is that real or false overflow

Yeah, would be good addition! And here "to send it on different hardware type" will be most appropriate.
Unfortunately, to implement such logic definitely additional coding on validator side required. Will see if someone could do this in near time but idea is quite good IMHO, worth to elevate it for review to SETI core team.