Meanwhile, people were asking why no results after 10 years, then 15 years, and finally almost 20 years. In 2017 DA wrote a report that said that Seti@home was simply an experiment, and like all experiments, it should have a beginning and an end, and a conclusion. His report said that after 18 years, they hadn't found anything, and were just collecting data and doing nothing with it. In his view the original experiment was over. DA proposed a project called Nebula which introduced a new back end, which would use the Atlas cluster at Hanover. However, 3 years later the software isn't ready despite help from Eric K.

The Admins can see that there is no point in continuing on as we are for another 20 years. We may have already found evidence of ET, but until we look in depth at the results, we won't know that. So three reasons for the mothballing, To look deeper at results already got, Lack of money, Lack of staff. It also could be said there are too many people using Seti as social media like Twitter or Facebook etc. We are supposed to be a scientific research program, not ranting about politics.

Remember an interview with someone from SETI years ago, might have been on The Guardian (but not sure), which included an estimate that something will be found in the first half of the 2020s, with hints coming at most a couple of years before the breakthrough, if it won't be completely sudden, so it seems like there was no expectation of a result earlier anyway. And that's entirely reasonable, and I'd call even this extremely optimistic.
As for what the project became for many, it is what it is, sometimes you should take a project where it goes instead of where it was "supposed" to be.

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One feature of Science United which I appreciate is the listing of CPU hours and GPU hours used by a project. One can immediately see which projects use GPUs and those which do not, also their relative weight in hours.
Tullio

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Many are finding Science United a duff idea. If you want to support a project helping Covid-19 try Folding at Home as many Setizens are, and have decided to do. Yes it is non-Boinc, so what?

Or just attach directly to Rosetta as Wiggo suggested.

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Grant
Darwin NT

"No, the purpose was a little different... Advertise Science United not Boinc Projects... using the Covid-19 crisis as a propagand boy. Something highly questionable from the ethics point in some cultures."

Many are finding Science United a duff idea. If you want to support a project helping Covid-19 try Folding at Home as many Setizens are, and have decided to do. Yes it is non-Boinc, so what?

At these difficult times we should support the world, Berkeley comes second.

"No, the purpose was a little different... Advertise Science United not Boinc Projects... using the Covid-19 crisis as a propagand boy. Something highly questionable from the ethics point in some cultures."

I agree and really did not appreciate it.

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Dave

I am running two Rosetta@home tasks , one in Windows 10 and the other in the Tumbleweed development version of OpenSuSE Linux. I know very well that I won't get any credit, only a weekly mail of thanks sent by a BoincAdmin.
Tullio

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The purpose of this thread (as I understand it) was to highlight that there are BOINC projects out there that are researching this virus, that Setizens might wish to consider after the 31st March.

No, the purpose was a little different... Advertise Science United not Boinc Projects... using the Covid-19 crisis as a propagand boy. Something highly questionable from the ethics point in some cultures.

SETI@home will stop distributing tasks soon, but we encourage you to continue donate computing power to science research - in particular, research on the COVID-19 virus. The best way to do this is to join Science United and check the "Biology and Medicine" box.

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The purpose of this thread (as I understand it) was to highlight that there are BOINC projects out there that are researching this virus, that Setizens might wish to consider after the 31st March.

Finally I got a minirosetta_3.7 task on a Linux box running in Science United. Also a Rosetta@home on a Windows 10 PC, also in Science United.
Tullio

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I still think the title of this thread is very misleading as there is no Seti@Home and COVID-19.

What exactly does "credit screw" mean?

It's the term often used here at Seti for Credit New- which was a change in the way credit is awarded for work done which resulted in people getting a lot less Credit (a lot less) then they did before Credit New was brought in. AFAIK most other BOINC projects don't use it for that reason.

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Grant
Darwin NT

What exactly does "credit screw" mean?

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Historian for the Defunct Riviera Hotel and Casino, Former Classic Seti@home user for Team Art Bell. Greetings from the High Desert!

I think there are some misconceptions here.

Way back prior to 1999, Mainframe and supercomputers were very expensive to hire per hour or day. David Gedeye proposed that Distributed Computing using the public's computers was feasible. Many thought not. So they picked a suitable UCB astronomy project (Seti) to carry out an experiment to try it. DA, Eric, Dan, Jeff, Matt etc were part of that original team. That project was what we know as Seti Classic launched in 1999. It was wildly successful beyond anyone's expectations.

So much so that many other scientific projects clamoured to be able to do the same, so a bigger team was put together to launch the BOINC umbrella incorporating Set@Home as the original lead project. At that point Seti had proved DC was viable and could have gone back in the UCB shadows. But people were not just using the original concept of unused CPU cycles in the background while you worked, people were building dedicated multi GPU rigs just for S&H so it continued and grew like Topsy.

However, it was realised that we needed to do a second sift on results to move on, so a Nitpicker m/c was proposed. But the parameters were changed at the last minute to a real time scenario, costing at the time $40K, likely $50K now, The money was not there so it got shelved. Meanwhile, people were asking why no results after 10 years, then 15 years, and finally almost 20 years. In 2017 DA wrote a report that said that Seti@home was simply an experiment, and like all experiments, it should have a beginning and an end, and a conclusion. His report said that after 18 years, they hadn't found anything, and were just collecting data and doing nothing with it. In his view the original experiment was over. DA proposed a project called Nebula which introduced a new back end, which would use the Atlas cluster at Hanover. However, 3 years later the software isn't ready despite help from Eric K.

The Admins can see that there is no point in continuing on as we are for another 20 years. We may have already found evidence of ET, but until we look in depth at the results, we won't know that. So three reasons for the mothballing, To look deeper at results already got, Lack of money, Lack of staff. It also could be said there are too many people using Seti as social media like Twitter or Facebook etc. We are supposed to be a scientific research program, not ranting about politics.

I will leave it all running in the background, and in the meantime crunch elsewhere when the work runs out. When it returns I'll be waiting.

I intend to keep processing WUs until S@H has no more to send me. Heck, my RAC has increased almost 4-fold since the new computer 10 days ago. More's the pity.

Still, money talks. Money makes the world go 'round and makes us go around the world. And nobody keeps the same job forever.

When S@H stops sending me WUs I will look for other worthy projects. I do not need to disparage the dreams and aspirations of others and I hope that what we have learned and will learn from S@H will inspire a continuing search for knowledge and not only about ET.

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Looking the last msgs, finally somebody post the real reason why S@H is going to hibernation, i have a suspicious but has no real info to be sure.

Eric has already posted the reason- Money.
They can run Seti@home, or analyse the data we have produced & then do the science paper (which was the whole reason for Seti@home existing in the first place), but not both.
If, when they had their requests for donations each year they got $1 million+, then Seti@home would still be running. It's that simple.

Hell, if i were as rich as Bill Gates or Warren Buffet i'd happily give then the hardware well in excess of their needs for now & in 20 years time, along with money to keep Seti@home going and to get data from more sources & i'd still have more money than God & no idea what to do with it. But i don't. So i can't.

And so here we are with Seti coming to a rather sad, grinding & whimpering end and not even making it to the official March 31 cutoff date.

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Grant
Darwin NT

David thinks of himself as the ultimate computer programmer

Please forgive me but could be a great scientist, an ultimate programmer, some of us who read his code has a different opinion.

Looking the last msgs, finally somebody post the real reason why S@H is going to hibernation, i have a suspicious but has no real info to be sure. I'm very sad to hear the true after all this years.

Hope someone pick the torch from the ground and continue to focus on the primary target, find an ET signal.

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Don't forget, there is already an over-arching Berkeley SETI Research Center, which includes SETI@Home but a whole lot more besides. I don't think David Anderson is part of the team there.

David thinks of himself as the ultimate computer programmer. His final paper will be about how he got the answer, not about whatever the answer turns out to be.

Who's idea was it anyway?

David Anderson is the sole creator of Science United.
You may know him as the co-creator of BOINC.
He is also the person that has been trying to shut down Seti for a couple of years.
He succeeded finally.

You forget to mention...
The father of credit Screw and one who never admit it's totally screwed.

He wants to write his final paper and retire. He isn't at all interested in passing the torch to another generation, if he can't get his final paper written. To get it written the data collection has to stop or so he thinks.

A smarter man might just image the dataset and write the paper from the image and let someone else carry on collection.

Frankly the real paper to write marries all the different SETI projects data sets and sees if ET sends laser pulses one week and radio the next.

Did he start SETI@home or was his sole claim to fame BOINC?

He was was a member of the SETI team right from the beginning - it was a team effort, not just one person.

And BOINC - with a much bigger team - grew out of the original 'SETI Classic'. I think I've counted up to around 150 volunteers' names in the contributors' lists.

Who's idea was it anyway?

David Anderson is the sole creator of Science United.
You may know him as the co-creator of BOINC.
He is also the person that has been trying to shut down Seti for a couple of years.
He succeeded finally.

You forget to mention...
The father of credit Screw and one who never admit it's totally screwed.

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