Posted on 12/17/2005 3:58:48 PM PST by Vermonter
SETI@Home Project Ends
For years, volunteers shared idle CPU cycles to analyze interstellar data. Phil Hochmuth, Network World Friday, December 16, 2005
Along with the Howard Stern Show, another radio endeavor involving alien life forms is going off the air this week; SETI@Home, a grid supercomputer project for detecting signs of extra terrestrial life from deep space, officially ended December 15.
"We'll be shutting down the "SETI@home Classic" project on December 15," read an e-mail sent by SETI@Home administrators at the University of California at Berkeley, where the project started in 1999. "The workunit totals of users and teams will be frozen at that point, and the final totals will be available on the Web."
The Search for Extra Terrestrial Life at Home (SETI@Home) project harness idle CPU cycles from millions of Internet-connected PCs across the globe in order to analyze data collected from massive radio telescopes. Running in place of a screensaver, the SETI@Home software, when downloaded on a PC, collected raw data from a centralized SETI@Home server bank and searched for patterns that might signal intelligent life--possible E.T., TV shows, radio communications, or other signals.
Other Applications Although the program ran as a screensaver the collective computing power was enormous; 2 million years of accumulated CPU time, and over 50 terabytes of data, or "workunits," parsed. More than 5 million users have downloaded the software, according to the project organizers.
The project also became a kind of competition for PC hobbyists known as "overclockers" who tweak their systems to run as fast as possible and use SETI@Home workunits to measure system performance and claim bragging rights.
But like the Stern show, SETI@Home will live on in another form. The project is being moved to the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), an open-source grid project using the same principles as the original project. BOINC will continue the search for E.T. radio signals, but a new client also allows users to devote spare CPU power for other research projects, such as climate change, astronomy, and curing human diseases.
Other such researchers have also adopted the SETI@Home approach for research projects that benefit from large amounts of computing power.
You can! They are switching to BOINC. There is a really neat project that is looking for gravity waves. http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/
One useful fact: After you establish your account and download and install BOINC Manager, go to the File Menu.Select Computer...
Enter "localhost" the Password should fill in.
If it doesn't, look in the file c:\Program Files\BOINC\gui_rpc_auth.cfg with notepad. Copy the string you find there, it is your password. Paste it down in the password box.
It took me about two hours to find this out.
The longer we go without hearing anything the more I'm convinced we are alone, at least in our galaxy.
I have been a SETI@home user at home and at work since '99. I've moved over to BOINK. No problem. Let's just keep listening. But I'm not holding my breath ...
In 4 years, my CPU's crunched out 11.14 years or 100,000 plus hours.
It was fun. At one time my 3 computers processed more units than 24 countries.
IT was bragging rights.
BOINC?
*snicker*
The thesis is that it is all Bush's fault, and after he is gone it will become the next highest ranking conservatives fault, go to beginning, repeat.
5 President=BUSH
10 Print "Global Warming is Real"
15 If Year >=2009 OR Bush=Impeached GOTO 40
20 PRINT "It is President's Fault. Impeach Him Now!"
25 GOTO 10
40 FindNew(President)
45 FindParty(President)
50 If Party=Republican GOTO 10
60 If Party=Democrat Print "Life is Good."
70 GOTO 60
FR causes my monitor to spend a lot of time firing a bunch of white pixels. What can I do with those?
Perhaps if we repointed some of those radars towards our border we would be able to do some good.
If you don't mind, please join the Free Republic Folders # 36120 in the Folding at Home project.
We have been going just over a year and have recently been promoting the team on the forum. In less than a month we have jumped from about 2,400th to 1,450th place and are on a pace to break Top 1000 in early January. We will float up to about Top 200 with just the muscle we have now. With your help we can break Top 100 in 2006.
See the thread at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1541538/posts for more info.
Wondering if Art Bell has been informed of this Ping.
Did they run out of Chuck Berry?
Please join the Free Republic Folders # 36120 in the Folding at Home project if lots of blank white pixels are not earning their keep.
See the thread at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1541538/posts for more info.
BOINC at Berkeley...
That could be a recruiting motto.
Yeah, and D.C. and the Congress, our planet, is the center of life in the universe.
Been running the BOINC client for quite a while now. I migrated over as soon as the new client was available. Still crunching data as usual.
Me too.
How dare you be so close minded, Cacique! It's because of people like you that these kinds of projects fail. I hope you can live with yourself.
:) HA!
Thanks for the ping!
I'm taking a hard look at our Congess, the Senate and the MSM, and it's appearant that we need to search to find any intelligence in them before we focus on space again.
What a ceaspool we have for leadership and what passes for journalism these days.
Unless something's changed, you can pick your project. When I switched from seti@home to BOINC, I was given that option.
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