Catching up on some news...

We suddenly had a window of opportunity to get another SERENDIP VI instrument built and deployed at Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. So we were all preoccupied with that project for the past month or so, culminating in most of the team (myself included) going to the site to hook everything up.

So what does this mean? Currently we have three instruments actively collecting data. One SETI@home data recorder at Arecibo - where all our workunits come from, and two SERENDIP VI instruments - one at Arecibo and one at Green Bank - collecting data in a different format. Once the dust settles on the recent install and we get our bearings on the SERENDIP VI data and bandwidth capabilities we will sort out how to get the computing power of SETI@home involved. Lots of work ahead of us and a very positive period of scientific growth and potential.

We also are in a very positive period of general team growth as the previously disparate hardware/software groups have slowly been merging together the past couple of years, and now that we all have a place to work here at Campbell Hall on campus - proximity changes everything. Plus we have the bandwidth to pick up some students for the summer. Basically the new building and the Green Bank project rekindled all kinds of activity. I hope this yields scientific and public-outreach improvements we've been sorely lacking for way too long (getting Steve Croft on board has already helped on these and many other fronts). We still need some new hardware, though. More about all this at some point soon...

Meanwhile, some notes about current day-to-day operations. Same old, same old. We got some new data from Arecibo which Jeff just threw into the hopper. I just had to go down to the colo and adjust some loose power cables (?!?!) that caused our web server to be down for about 12 hours this morning. Some failed drives were replaced, some more failed drives need to be replaced. Now that Jeff and I are back to focusing on SETI@home the various database-improvement projects are back on our plates...

Speaking of databases, the Astropulse rebuild project continues! As predicted the big rebuild project on the temporary database completed in early June. To speed this up (from a year to a mere 3 months) I did all the rebuilding in 8 table fragments and ran these all in parallel. I thought the merging of the fragments into one whole table would take about an hour. In practice it took 8 days. Fine. That finished this past weekend, and I started an index build that is still running. When that completes we then have to merge the current active database with this one. So there are many more steps, but the big one is behind us. I think. It needs to be restated that we are able to acheive normal public-facing operations on Astropulse during all this, outside of some brief (i.e. less than 24 hour) outages in the future.

Speaking of outages, this Saturday (the 27th) we will be bringing the project down for the day as the colo is messing with power lines and while they are confident we shouldn't lose power during their upgrades we're going to play it safe and make sure our databases are quiescent. I'll post something on the front page about this.

Still no word about new cricket traffic graphs, but that's rolled up with various campus-level network projects so there's not much we can do about that.

- 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

Thanks for the info, Matt. Getting some cricket graphs back up would help us armchair quarterbacks second-guessing what's happening at any given instant. :-)

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Thanks for the update Matt! Exciting!

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"It is often darkest just before it turns completely black."

Thanks for the update Matt! Exciting!

+1

Thanks Matt.

Claggy

Great update and some wonderful news!
Thank you very much, Matt.

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"Time is simply the mechanism that keeps everything from happening all at once."

Thank you for the update Matt.

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rOZZ
Music
Pictures

Thank You for this update, and thanks to everybody at Seti@Home staff.

Exciting news. Thanks for the update.

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