Posts by Raistmer

101) Message boards : News : SETI@home hibernation (Message 2039263)
Posted 20 Mar 2020 by Profile Raistmer
Post:
Short version- not enough money to keep doing both.

IMHO it's rather manpower than money itself. Until we speak about money to hire few professionals in radiophysics/signal processing and DB administration not interesting in this research per se. Would be possible to find someone who will handle full pipeline as effective as Eric and others did all these years w/o bothering them with constant questions? I'm afraid not. Money can easely "find" few more HDDs if needed, but not so easy with right skilled professionals.
102) Message boards : News : SETI@home hibernation (Message 2038515)
Posted 17 Mar 2020 by Profile Raistmer
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IMHO if final data analyse will give negative result or even if it will be never finished at all, in ALL cases time spent on this project in those 20+ years was NOT wasted for all involved.
103) Message boards : News : SETI@home hibernation (Message 2038041)
Posted 15 Mar 2020 by Profile Raistmer
Post:
Yes, it's a three - no, four - stage pipeline: collect, process, analyse, publish.

But if any one link in the chain is broken, the entire chain is useless. Up until now, the broken link has been the analysis. Now, we're proposing to break the processing link, to repair the analysis link. So there won't be anything more to analyse in future, despite the collection continuing at an ever-increasing pace.

Yep, "least of evil"-kind of decision - can't be really good....
Until SETI staff increased (I would say increase should be twice approx, at least 2 new persons with solid education in corresponding field and few graduates) it seems this inevitable...
104) Message boards : News : SETI@home hibernation (Message 2038036)
Posted 15 Mar 2020 by Profile Raistmer
Post:

The most recent item on the Breakthrough Listen news feed talks about making more data available for other people to process, but is silent on who might be doing that processing.

They collect, we process... but the analyse part stalls with Nebula... As I understand, main reason for hibernation is to finish Nebula and get results finally. "Results" that our computers return not real results in sense "yes, we found ET signal", they should be aggregated and summarized some way - that step Nebula should do. And to summarize them access to whole database of reported "signals"(in sense S@h client) required - that prevents DC-style of processing and limits our involvement in that stage.
105) Message boards : Number crunching : Open note to all the Annonymnous Platform developers (Message 2037528)
Posted 12 Mar 2020 by Profile Raistmer
Post:

I expect that many of the techniques you have come up with are of much wider application than just SETI, so, once you've recovered I look forward to seeing your names pop up on other projects and pushing their applications to new boundaries.


It's true, there are some paradigms learned that could be applied to other apps... but what could be as inspiring as SETI?....
Personally I hope we all recover after hibernation to new SETI apps and approaches.
106) Message boards : Number crunching : More cores, worse performance? Why? (Message 2037527)
Posted 12 Mar 2020 by Profile Raistmer
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Are the tasks by themselves for the CPU and GPU basically the same or are they completely different in nature? I always thought they were somehow different and that partially explained why the GPU tasks finish so quickly.

-=- Boris

Exactly the same.
107) Message boards : Number crunching : More cores, worse performance? Why? (Message 2037524)
Posted 12 Mar 2020 by Profile Raistmer
Post:
Does the GPU card really make that much of a difference?

Thoughts?

-=- Boris

Yes, it does.

And second-order effects to consider: More simultaneous tasks mean increased CPU cache evictions/misses. And, finally,memory bandwidth saturation.
So, increasing number of logical CPUs w/o corresponding improvement in CPU L3 cache size and RAM speed will give diminishing results at some point.
108) Message boards : News : SETI@home hibernation (Message 2037521)
Posted 12 Mar 2020 by Profile Raistmer
Post:
In fact, an advanced ET race is more likely to find us first than us them. What happens when that occurs and they say take us to your leader? Er, um,. sorry guv, we ain't got one! United nations? Rather not think so. Trump, Putin? Lord help us.

Hardly more advanced civilization will have desire to speak with current officials.
More probably some kind of progressors (look for Arkady and Boris Strugatsky SiFi books regarding this concept) will be sent.
109) Message boards : Number crunching : SETI orphans (Message 2037319)
Posted 11 Mar 2020 by Profile Raistmer
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I've been looking at Einstein as a new home. They were friendly enough to open a spot in their boards to let us chat on Tuesdays, so that earns them bonus points in my book. How is their uptime? do they have a weekly outage? do I need to configure my system differently?

AFAIK no weekly outages. But their tasks are huge (in RAM usage metric). On 32-bit OS I got memory issues when SETI queue dry and Einstein's tasks come into play.
110) Message boards : Nebula : Estimating sensitivity (Message 2037007)
Posted 9 Mar 2020 by Profile Raistmer
Post:

* We can’t study sensitivity to pulsed signals since we haven't implemented pulsed birdies. Future work.
* We can’t study factors specific to Gaussians (e.g. amount of time observed at Gaussian slew rates) since we currently don’t make Gaussians for birdies. Future work.

Ups %)
And how PulseFind algorithm validation done then?
111) Message boards : News : SETI@home hibernation (Message 2037006)
Posted 9 Mar 2020 by Profile Raistmer
Post:
BTW, if scientometrics plays same role in US universities as it became to play here SETI core team in big trouble for years already.
Publicational activity quite low so it could be hard to justify own places @US Berkeley staff. No matter how important research you do, if it provides low "scores" - you in trouble...
So, quite possible they really need to publish and spend whole time on papers preparation. Just because of those "external"reasons.
112) Message boards : News : SETI@home hibernation (Message 2037003)
Posted 9 Mar 2020 by Profile Raistmer
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If what my computers have analyzed needs to be reanalyzed, then why isn't our computers doing it to help out?

that's the problem. and nobody will answer it.

Next processing stage requires access to whole database. So it can't be distributed.
We do first part that can be separated to many unlinked pieces. Next stage will link results of all those parts together.
113) Message boards : Number crunching : 20th Anniversary T-shirts (Message 2036885)
Posted 9 Mar 2020 by Profile Raistmer
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Hibernation better.
Don't entice permanent shutdown by such T-shirt title ;)

And _IF_ it would appear permanent, another T-shirt with R.I.P. will be appropriate
114) Message boards : SETI@home Staff Blog : This hurts me as much as it hurts you. (Message 2036741)
Posted 8 Mar 2020 by Profile Raistmer
Post:

Even then, it's hard to put a halt to a process that you gave 20 years of your life. I certainly haven't achieved everything I wanted to with SETI@home. I've still got my plans for SETI@home version 10, there was just never time to implement them. Maybe when we've finished our results papers I'll dust them off, assuming I can find the resources.

So true... Hope it will be pause not stop.
115) Message boards : Number crunching : Doing Seti Research by ourselves (Message 2036724)
Posted 8 Mar 2020 by Profile Raistmer
Post:
Well, to do smth useful there should be new approach to search. New patterns. New freq ranges. Maybe even whole new spectrum band (like optical SETI).
And skilled professional to define such patterns. That's hard part. And then definitely some new form of distributed processing can be formed.
As I see the main issue of current SETI@home search - it's hugely undermanned. Just devastately huge. Persons who need to deal exclusively with mentioned "hard part" spend lot of time for just system administration.
116) Message boards : Number crunching : SETI orphans (Message 2036723)
Posted 8 Mar 2020 by Profile Raistmer
Post:
By the last statistics there will by about 200 000 SETI orphan hosts.

Where they will go?

Perhaps we should all set up a new team called Seti Orphans, and go invade another project.. ? :-)


I like such idea! Maybe on different projects but the same team, SETI Orphans :)
Would be the honour to participate !

P.S. my personal choice would be Einstein@home as closest in spirit one.
Will see if it can feed all my different devices. Not compatible ones will search for new targets...
117) Message boards : Number crunching : Suggestions/Comments for a SETI@home v3 (Message 2036722)
Posted 8 Mar 2020 by Profile Raistmer
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We have 20 years experience with s@h running on BOINC (s@h 'v2')...

We had the start of a whole new world of volunteer distributed computing with s@h 'classic' (s@h 'v1')...

Over that quarter century since 1995, the original design of s@h has held up remarkably well spanning from the days of 14kbit/s dialup internet and the WUs taking a month of CPU time, to now enjoying the vast power and rates and Gigabit/s we have today. Remarkably, all on the same one s@h database!...


So, for our pause-for-thought during a hibernation, what ideas do we have from us users?


Can I start the ball of ideas rolling with:

  • Usefully 'bigger' or more 'compute intensive' WUs to make further use of our ever increasing compute power?

  • Yet also some 'smaller' WUs (different processing) to still take advantage of the lower power abilities of the vast expanse of mobile devices?



And to maintain continuity for the s@h project:


  • A list in the profiles for our present users listing how many WUs (and of which types) have been successfully processed by that user and the credits and CPU time donated?

  • Also include the latest/last RAC achieved by that user?

  • Monthly updates during the hibernation for s@h news and directions?




What do you all think?

What would you like to see next?

And how??


Keep searchin'!
Martin



All you proposed and something more!
118) Message boards : Number crunching : 20th Anniversary T-shirts (Message 2036721)
Posted 8 Mar 2020 by Profile Raistmer
Post:
Definitely should do a

"Seti@Home 1999-2020
- almost 21 years..."


;^)


+++!!!!
119) Message boards : News : SETI@home hibernation (Message 2036714)
Posted 8 Mar 2020 by Profile Raistmer
Post:
Well, I hope SETI boards will alive still. Would be good if SETI core team will still post updates from time to time on Nebula or alternative SETI projects.
And maybe some volunteer involvment would be still possible in some new form.
120) Message boards : News : SETI@home hibernation (Message 2036713)
Posted 8 Mar 2020 by Profile Raistmer
Post:
Oops......

We're excited to finish up our original science project, and we look forward to what comes next.

It should be new search with new types of patterns and new freq. bands.


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