Seti@Home Bandwidth Problems 295
reflexreaction writes: "With so many of the /. users actively using and supporting Seti@home, many of you have realized that in the last couple of weeks that Seti has had some serious problems receiving completed data and getting new data to process from its 3 million members because of network bandwidth problems. All the gritty details are here. The article details some things that users can do to alleviate some of the problems including connecting during off hours and downloading more than unit than once using programs like SetiQueue for PC and Seti Unit Manager for Mac. Donations are also accepted. There is also a plea for bandwidth donations. It will be truly unfortunate if this page becomes /.ted without benefit from /. users."
Linking to SETI@Home isn't helping much... (Score:2, Funny)
Priorities.. Reflections on the project (Score:5, Insightful)
Disclamer: I have never been part of SETI@home; I feel that statistically it's a collossal waste of time. I've been part of both the GIMPS project [mersenne.org] and the distributed.net RC5-64 [distributed.net] projects for about four years now. I've got the Kevlar body armor halfway on.
The good, I guess, is that there's such a collossal interest in this. I mean, hell, if KzAplOcQQ and boB are sharing the Encyclopaedia Galactica (or the Hitchikers' Guide, whatever) over radio waves, then we'll eventually find it hopefully in something that resembles paEr Unicode.
However, I see a great many downsides to this.
First off, if the aforementioned theoretical KzAplocQQ and boB of the paEr race have to use radio waves, then there's a pretty good chance they haven't been able to go superphotonic, in which case we're going to have a long wait before we can even think of going to their New York and flipping them the left tentacle.
Secondly, how will we be able to decode a xenic dataset, much less their language? I mean, what if they can transmit trits or quaytes while we're looking for bits or bytes? How do we know what a newline would appear? Hell, do we even know if it would even be necessary? And what about the characters? What if the Chinese language is easier to interpret than paEr?
Third, there are much better uses of free cycles, at least fiscally. GIMPS will provide a hundred kilobucks to the first person to successfully find a ten megadigit Mersenne prime. distributed.net provides a two kilobuck prize and a large donation to the FSF, EFF, or other worthy charities. Even the commercial distributed computing projects at least pay for the use of your rig.
(PS: paEr is a theoretical name for a xenic (alien) species, contrived from randomly entering characters on the number pad. KzAplocQQ is an unpronouncable name, unless you're lucky or high. boB just sounds funny.)
Re:Priorities.. Reflections on the project (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, do I believe that there's intelligent life out there just yearning to have it's radio signals read? Nope, I don't; although I think it's silly to believe that humans are the only intelligent life in the galaxy, I do believe that intelligence is so rare that in all likelihood our nearest neighbors are too far away to communicate with. So why allow SETI to suck up my extra cycles? Because although I think the project has zero chance of discovering intelligent life, the work and the hopes of all of these dedicated folks appeals to me. I let them use my cycles so they can get closer to answering the question near and dear to their hearts, even though ultimately I don't think they'll like what the find (i.e., silence).
Still, it doesn't matter if anyone else thinks I'm 'wasting' my cycles. They're mine to waste as I please.
Max
Re:Linking to SETI@Home isn't helping much... (Score:1)
Another solution (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Another solution (Score:1)
Re:Another solution (Score:1)
Re:Another solution (Score:1)
Re:Another solution (Score:1)
willy
Re:Another solution (Score:1)
Re:Another solution (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Another solution (Score:1)
Re:Another solution (Score:2, Redundant)
If you didn't see the story last week here it is (http://www.theinquirer.net/15020202.htm)
"THE INTEL/UD cancer project is about to close, but there is confusion as to whether this is due to a shortage of funds or because the work has been completed. According to Andy Prince, Director of Corporate Communications at UD, the cancer programme is about to be terminated because its goals have been met.
Said Prince: "Absolutely. We have actually exceeded our goals as far as the cancer project goes. According to the contract, we agreed to analyze 250M molecules against 8 proteins. We are close to finishing 3.5B molecules against 12 proteins and will be announcing the close of the project soon - not a premature close, but the actual end of the project. "
Re:Another solution (Score:2)
Re:Another solution (Score:1)
The cure itself is the prize if you or someone you love develops cancer!
save them some more BW, read the details here (Score:4, Informative)
2/6/2002
The problem
When your SETI@home screensaver downloads a work unit, the data flows from a server in our laboratory, through the University of California at Berkeley campus network, and through a connection to the commercial Internet. This connection is shared by all UCB Internet users - departmental web and FTP sites, email, SETI@home, and so on. The University pays for bandwidth on this connection; it is currently buying 70 megabits per second (Mbps). The student residence hall have a separate 40 Mbps connection.
Until recently, SETI@home was given about 25 Mbps, and the remaining 45 Mbps was shared by the rest of campus. But starting last month (January 2002) the bandwidth used by the rest of campus increased in an unexpected and unexplained way. During peak periods the demand now exceeds 70 Mbps. If SETI@home continued to use 25 Mbps, the performance of all other outgoing traffic would suffer.
The UCB network administrators have worked hard to balance the bandwidth needs of SETI@home and the rest of campus. Currently, SETI@home traffic is given lower priority than other traffic. During peak periods (typically 10 AM - 10 PM PST) SETI@home averages 6 Mbps, and sometimes gets no bandwidth. During non-peak periods SETI@home gets as much as 50 Mbps.
When SETI@home is not getting enough bandwidth, our data server backs up - all of its processes are waiting to send data, and it can't accept new connections. During these periods, your screensaver will get report that it "can't connect to server".
The impact on our overall computing rate is significant but not too serious - the rate has dropped about 25%. But many SETI@home users are unhappy that their computers are sitting idle for many hours, waiting for data. We share this unhappiness, and are working to solve the problem.
Short-term solutions
We're working on several short-term solutions:
Increase the bandwidth of UCB's network connection. We hope to "expand the pipe" by about 10 Mbps - enough to ease, but not eliminate, the crisis. The issue is money - bandwidth costs about $300 a month per megabit, and neither SETI@home nor the university has budgeted for this cost.
Send data more efficiently. Currently work units are encoded as text. By sending them in binary, we can shrink them by about 25%. (Note: data compression isn't effective for our data, which is primarily random noise). This change will require a new version of the client software. Increase the amount of computation per work unit. Doubling the CPU time per work unit - by looking at more chirp rates, for example - will reduce bandwidth by 50%. There is scientific justification for doing this, although the law of diminishing returns applies. This will also require a new version of the client software. Long-term solutions
The long-term solution is to allow work units to be sent from servers outside UC Berkeley. This could be done, for example, by sending work units to servers at organizations - companies and universities - that are willing to donate part of their outgoing network bandwidth to SETI@home. In addition to solving the current problem, this could greatly increase our overall data capacity, enabling us to search for ET signals in a wider frequency band.
This solution represents a significant change to our software; we will use this approach in our next-generation software. We are seeking funding to develop this software, and it won't be ready for at least 6 months.
What you can do There are a couple of things you can do to keep your computers busy processing SETI@home data:
If you connect manually (e.g., over a modem) try connecting during off hours (23:00 to 3:00 Pacific Standard Time, or 7:00 to 11:00 UT). You can check the Server status page to see if we're currently dropping connections. Download more than one work unit when you connect. This can be done manually, or by automated workunit caching software. Example programs include SetiQueue for Windows, or Seti Unit Manager for Macintosh. For more information about other SETI@home add-ons see our links page.
To help us achieve a short-term solution, you can help in two ways:
Donate to SETI@home. This will enable us to buy network bandwidth. Help us find "bandwidth sponsors". We hope that a major commercial ISP might donate bandwidth to UC Berkeley to help SETI@home. If you work for, or have contacts in, such a company, please contact us.
Re:save them some more BW, read the details here (Score:1)
Someone tell those guys at Berkeley to stop downloading so much freakin' PR0N!!!
-Russ
Re:save them some more BW, read the details here (Score:1, Offtopic)
I read the subject line. As another poster put it, it's "whoretastic!".
Use Google Mirrors! (Score:4, Informative)
About the current bandwidth problems [google.com]
chirp rates? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:chirp rates? (Score:2)
I've got one I can sell you. Cheep.
Easy solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Easy solution (Score:1)
Simple elegant, and wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Easy solution (Score:2)
Re:Easy solution (Score:2)
add some digital signatures, and you could avoid (or detect) tampering.
Re:Easy solution (Score:2, Informative)
In fact, more presentations about the BW problem at serveral universities is here [nlanr.net]. They'd like to use traffic shapers, but traffic shapers are only designed to handle T1-level traffic, not OC3-level traffic.
I saw the presentations in person (and I'm from Berkeley). They don't want to get in the business of deciding what is valid traffic, nor investing time to block the various workarounds (e.g., HTML proxies) that people will use to get around the filters.
A temporary solution is to use proxies at other campuses to send the traffic to Berkeley via Internet2 [internet2.edu], since that traffic is free and isn't being restricted at Berkeley.
Dnet had this figured out from the beginning (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:Dnet had this figured out from the beginning (Score:3, Informative)
I've used SETI@Home and United Devices before, but frankly, I didn't like them much.
SETI has more users than it needs, last time I checked, the same data was being tested over and over again, simply because they have more volunteers than they need. I'd much rather see that CPU time go to the projects that need it.
United Devices has an admirable goal, curing cancer, but a lack of SMP support in their clients, and the lack of a Linux or Mac client pretty much rules them out for me. I use Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X every day, I can't run United Devices on all those platforms...
So come on everybody that's running SETI, save them some bandwidth, come join distributed.net, and we can power through the rest of RC5-64!!!
Just don't get me started on the OGR projects, they've been open for too long, and no one seems to know how to close them. OGR-24 should have been done a long time ago, but isn't, due (apparently) to a lack of managerial oversight, or poor planning.
Re:Dnet had this figured out from the beginning (Score:2)
Re:Dnet had this figured out from the beginning (Score:2)
Wrong. Learn, before you speak.
From one of the FAQ pages [berkeley.edu]:
If a signal is observed two or more times, and it's not RFI or a test signal, the SETI@home team will ask another group to take a look. This other group will be using different telescopes, receivers, computers, etc. This will hopefully rule out a bug in our equipment or our computer code
Need you still wonder why the same Work Unit is processed by 2 or 3 machines?
Didn't think so.
Gritty details? (Score:2, Insightful)
Doh. I was looking for the gritty details. Massive DDOS bot invasion? SNMP exploit? Warez? Rogue Quake III servers? Son of Napster? Backhoe dug up a cable? There has to be at least an educated guess as to where the bandwidth is going.
I think the network admins at UC Berkeley are just cutting back on Seti, but don't want to admit it publicly. Bad press and all.
Re:Gritty details? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Gritty details? (Score:2)
Re:Gritty details? (Score:2)
Re:Gritty details? (Score:2)
Tell it to cache replies for 45 seconds (so that external gnutella clients always show up later than local clients) and provide a list of IP addresses of local addresses that've made requests in the last 10 minutes. (so that other gnutella users can hook up to local gnutella network)
Leave e/t else alone, and I bet gnutella usage drops by 80%, while still allowing students to download the latest Britney mpeg. Block Morpheus.
Mystery Solved... (Score:1)
Student goes home for Xmas. Student gets new Windows XP box. Student chats like a 20-something adult using built-in chat SW.
Bandwidth dissapears Jan 03, 2002.
Re:Mystery Solved... (Score:1)
Re:Mystery Solved... (Score:2)
Re:Mystery Solved... (Score:2)
Re:Mystery Solved... (Score:2)
Isn't it possible to use these services from computers not on the dorm network?
Doh. (Score:2, Funny)
Article in March '02 _Scientific American_ (Score:3, Interesting)
Possibly of related interest, the is an article on Internet Scale Operating Systems [sciam.com] in the newest Scientific American.
Scaleability (Score:4, Interesting)
I've always believed the bottleneck in Distributed Computing was the Data Packets being sent/recieved because the demand will grow exponentially the more users you aquire.
Most applications seem to remidy this problem by limiting the data packet sizes from 5 - 15k compressed packets. This has worked for projects like Distributed.net.
I can only forsee the future of this problem being the same that plagues Video Card Chipsets, which is insted of re-engineering the device to make a more robust and lower overhead solution, they'll just throw a bigger pipe on the line (much like Memory Bandwidth demand).
But again, my respect goes out to the Seti@Home team and their sponsors for architecting a technological data mining marvel.
Re:Scaleability (Score:1, Insightful)
Call me crazy, but I'd guess that demand on seti's servers grows linearly with the number of users. Unless each new user gets sent all of the data ever sent to all the previous users, of course.
Re:Scaleability (Score:1)
With respect to what? (Score:2)
Call me crazy, but I'd guess that demand on seti's servers grows linearly with the number of users.
However, the number of users grows exponentially with respect to time. Grandparent specified only that "the demand will grow exponentially" and that it will increase as the number of users increases. A colloquial meaning of "grow exponentially" is to grow following the early exponential-like stages of a logistic model [google.com], a model designed to model the spread of information such as a web site URL or a Warhol worm [berkeley.edu].
Difficult balance (Score:1)
This has to be a difficult balancing act for them; while they don't give details about the exact nature of the doublechecking (so that people don't try to bypass it), this has to be eating the bandwidth for them.
Maybe a better solution is not to increase bandwidth but to encrypt the data to prevent tampering?
Necessity is the mother of invention (Score:5, Interesting)
Necessity is, after all, the mother of invention.
As their own statement points out, two of the short-term solutions include making the data sent out more efficient (binary instead of text) and letting each node do more computation.
SETI@home was originally developed to male up for the shortcomings of processing power of any single computer. To solve the problem, they took a bit of a free ride on networking bandwidth to distribute the problem.
Now their success is also forcing them to be more efficient when it comes to network bandwidth, as well as processor, utilization.
So this forced economy will hopefully make the system more efficient through improvement of the system.
Pie-in-the-sky and we have all the computing power and bandwidth we need, but then who would have an incentive to innovate?
Ultimately, SETI@home's legacy will probably have less to do with discoveries of extraterrestrial intelligence and more to do with the evolution of better computing techniques!
surprising low 70Mbps for UCB (Score:3, Informative)
Internet2's goal is 1Tbps connections -- That's faster than 70Mbps by over 10^5. Pretty funny.
It's 110Mbps combined (Score:2, Informative)
My solution... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:My solution... (Score:2, Informative)
Google to the rescue? (Score:5, Funny)
waste of time and electricity? (Score:2, Informative)
What is the point anyhow? I mean this is collectively costing them (probably) billions of dollars a month to do this - between everyone's increased power bill. And seriously - what are the chances that their algorithm are going to find something worthwhile?
Re:waste of time and electricity? (Score:2)
I'm as guilty as any though. I keep my 2 boxen on all the time.
The idle loop *does* save CPU power (Score:2)
At any rate Seti doesn't use any extra power if your computer is running anyways since a CPU is always at 100% anyways (cept instead of SETI data it is doing Idle Loop calcs).
Not necessarily. Some operating systems call a special instruction when they hit the idle loop. This instruction tells the processor to go to sleep until the timer or a device signals an interrupt to the CPU. I'm sure Windows 98 and 98se do that; my laptop fan runs less often when I run dnetc than when I run only the system idle process.
Re:waste of time and electricity? (Score:2, Informative)
Your second last paragraph doesn't make much sense. The reason chips use power is that whenever one CMOS transistor switches from one state to the other, it uses a small power surge, so the overall power usage depends on the CPU clock speed and how many of the transistors are switching around.
I should note, though, that the CPU uses 30-60 watts of power at the most (Pentium III/Celeron are in the 30 watt range, while Pentium 4 and Athlon chips get into the higher end - some other chips like PowerPC use considerably less). Certainly you should worry less about this than the people who leave their monitor on all the time without using the power management function..
Compression? (Score:1)
Aside from that : WHY can't SETI get the TINY amount of cash it needs to handle this problem?
p2p (Morpheus, Gnutella) the culprit? (Score:3, Interesting)
> But starting last month (January 2002) the
> bandwidth used by the rest of campus increased in
> an unexpected and unexplained way.
I wonder if this isn't a byproduct of the intense bandwidth issues associated with peer to peer apps like Gnutella and Morpheus, popular music "sharing" applications that seem to get a bit of use on college grounds nationwide. I'd guess (if I had to; definitely talking out ye old arse here) the reason bandwidth usage wasn't noticed sooner is that many places (my place of work included -- I'm a gov't contractor) are placing a pretty high priority on "Homeland Security", including taking a fresh look at internet usage.
These things aren't exactly bandwidth friendly (see http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~matei/PAPERS/gnute
Anyhow, that's what came to mind when I read the blurb. I think their best short term solution might be to chase down unattended Gnutella and Morpheus/KaZaA applications and get back that bandwidth.
Seti@Home? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Seti@Home? (Score:2, Funny)
Dear unwashed heathen,
Do not question the Church of Slashdot. Whereas we routinely mock Creationists as the lunatic fringe, we do not hold with the questioning of the legitimacy of a project that one day may lead to the Faithful having sex with aliens. Just like on Star Trek (or Babylon 5, according to the Orthodox branch of the CoS).
Regardless of your feeble thinking, SETI@Home is deserving of all your base.
For Great Justice!
The Cleansed and Purified
Re:Seti@Home? (Score:4, Insightful)
Humans are made of meat, and sure, cancer is a problem we'd like to solve. But humans are also uniquely explorers and thinkers, and Not Knowing(tm) IS genuinely one of our problems. Some believe that SETI is a step towards solving that problem. File it under "motivation" or "purpose" (by simplying "knowing").
A future generation may answer the eternal question for us. And if they do, every generation that follows will be affected in their daily outlook, their goals, their attitudes, their comforts, their concerns, etc. That's at least as profound as a cure for cancer.
An easy solution (Score:5, Informative)
Go, do it now, I swear you'll feel all warm and fuzzy.
Re:An easy solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah. Why bother looking for such trivial things as life in the universe besides us? Why should we have gone into the rain forest just for the sake of going? Let's forget about we found a new type of antibiotic in the process.
Why should we do things with no clear prospect of return? Well, one could argue we do them for science. You know? That old thing that leads to new advances in humanity? One could argue that great discoveries are often by accident. That means by looking and doing something new -- not always directed toward solving the problem at hand -- leads to a solution of a major problem.
What does all of this have to do with searching for aliens? Well, it means we shouldn't stop doing something that some here might think as trivial or un-worldly, just because there are other issues at home. There will always be issues at home. Curing cancer, in many ways, is just as big a task as SETI@Home. It's the same as those who questioned the spending of millions of dollars for the space program, and that sending a man to the moon was stupid since we couldn't even solve our own problem of where to put and feed our own people.
Well, what has gone to the moon given us? Certainly not a cure for cancer, at least not directly. What is has done is captured the imaginations of all those who were glued to the TV when those infamous images were sent back...Maybe a few of those millions have actually gone on to become doctors, engineers, etc. who have cured a disease or solved a new problem for humanity. It represented something new, raised hopes for people during that time and allowed many to live vicariously and not be concerned with current "at home" issues like finding a job or worrying about the war.
There is a lot of merit for science dedicated toward application and I don't have any problem with, say, searching the a cure for cancer or Alzheimers. But the argument of there are better things to do is like the argument of "People are wasting bandwidth for trivial uses, that's why the Internet is so slow.".
We should all dedicate our efforts toward solving our present problems, but we should always save a little to go to the moon once in a while...
Re:An easy solution (Score:2)
Looking around for a signal that has a vanishingly small chance of being found during the existence of the human race is of pretty mickle value compared with adding known results to a database of likely candidates for effective treatments of painful and costly diseases that might just save your life.
Or your sister's. Or your mom's.
But of course, if we find the space aliens, they will bring us the cures for these diseases anyway.
And maybe in return for our contacting them on a nice quality of letterhead, they won't turn us into brood hives for their younglings.
--Blair
"Dumbass."
Re:An easy solution (Score:2)
I think you'll find they cost energy (power consumption), cause extra noise pollution (localized; fans running faster) and will contribute to shortened hardware lifespan.
My CPUs dropped by about 7degC when I stopped running d.net. Of course, that also meant I rapidly fell out of the top 100 charts
Re:An easy solution (Score:2)
I was running dNet clients on a solaris farm for about a month. The temperature in the room dropped 5 degrees c one hour after shutting the clients down.
Re:An easy solution (Score:2)
1 CPU.
22 idle hours, or more like 10 hours where the idle cycles aren't interspersed with keystrokes and pr0n downloads, and the BIOS could put the CPU to sleep.
0.3 kWh per day.
Around here, electricity is 8 cents per kWh (your neighborhood really should get yourself a nuke plant; 35c/kWh is for NIMBYs).
2.4 cents per day in additional (*voom*) in order to generate a few dozen extra hits on possible cures for Anthrax, etc.
It takes longer to do that calculation than to earn that 2.4 cents.
Spare CPU cycles are free, for reasonably small values of free.
--Blair
"Ask Sartre some time what that means."
Re:An easy solution (Score:2)
But then again they might run into server problems too.
Re:An easy solution (Score:2)
I would like to go to the moon. That would be cool. Watching alien TV would be cool too.
It would have been somewhat cooler however if I hadn't lost 4 relatives under 50 to cancer in the last 5 years.
ET or Cancer... ET or Cancer... ET or Cancer... we have to ask???
Re:An easy solution (Score:2)
It would have been somewhat cooler however if I hadn't lost 4 relatives under 50 to cancer in the last 5 years.
ET or Cancer... ET or Cancer... ET or Cancer... we have to ask???
Yes, we do have to ask. Let me give you an example, the laser. When lasers were first developed, it was called a solution in search of a problem. A cool toy, sure, but no use to anyone.
But today, lasers are in CD and DVD players, surveying equipment, surgical tools, weapons, communications devices and machine tools. I don't think there's anyone in the Western world who doesn't (whether they are aware of it or not) use a laser or a product or service depending on lasers every day.
People have been searching for a cure for cancer for a long time, without success. That suggests that the avenues of research that are being pursued don't lead to it. This is why basic research is so vital, because once a solution like a laser is found, whole new classes of problems can be solved.
Since I'm not given to futurology, I won't say that SETI research is in anyway relevent to cancer, but here's the thing: no-one knows yet.
Re:An easy solution (Score:2)
For me, the prospect of helping to cure cancer and alzheimers is more immediately important than searching for extraterrestrial life, though I'm not so short-sighted as to ignore the importance of research for the sake of research.
Re:Yes but... (Score:2)
Uh, do you really thing that ET is going to have some advice on curing human diseases like Alzeihmers, cancer, or Anthrax?
The only thing that extraterrestrials will be able to tell us about medicine is how to get rid of intergalactic genital warts.
Re:Cynical about drug industry (Score:2)
Happily, the US government's recent public patent-busting hard-on for Cipro has taken the wind out of their sails in this regard. Look for a whole lot less stubbornness from Washington on the drug patent issue in the near future.
Conspiracy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Conspiracy (Score:2)
it works on computers too!
Re:Conspiracy (Score:2, Funny)
Oh no... (Score:2, Funny)
More then one... (Score:3, Interesting)
But what I really wish was created was a single program which all other tasks of this nature could be setup as plug-in's.... each plug-in getting all the unused cycles until it completes a unit and then the next plug-in get's it's turn... maybe even be able to decide how you want to skew the processings:
5 Seti@ Home units, then 12 UD units, 4 Folding@Home, etc....
There are a lot of projects out there I'd like to help with.... if only they'd play nice...
Re:More then one... (Score:2)
1) I think that it's very great that you're running the Cancer thing, but:
2) It's NOT possible to run 2 apps that want 100% of your CPU at the same time.
I run SETI. I have been for about 2 years now. If I hadn't already dedicated machines to SETI, I'd be doing the cancer thing.
I smoke...
Re:More then one... (Score:2)
But SETI doesn't need 100% of your CPU. It's not real-time! Ever heard of timeslicing? I have setiathome and foldingathome running just fine on my Linux box, at the same time. You just have to make sure that they have the same nice value (aka "priority").
If I hadn't already dedicated machines to SETI, I'd be doing the cancer thing.
You should be able to do so, unless you have a crap operating system.
The solution is obvious... (Score:2)
So it sounds like all they need to do is ban students from running Windows XP ("Do you want to download a patch? How 'bout a passport account? You know you want one. All your friends are getting them. And I've got another security update for you...what'd you say? Come on, give it a try. The first one's free you know..." etc. etc. That's probably 80% of the bandwidth right there.)
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Note for the humour impaired...oh, what's the use.
AAAARRRGGHHHH!!!!! (Score:2, Offtopic)
It's == It Is
Its == possessive version of 'it'
The rules of the apostrophe for it/its/it's are a special case and do not follow "Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots [angryflower.com]."
</troll>
mirrors (Score:2)
Also, the big "work_unit.sah" file appears to have most of its content in a uuencoded-type of format, which makes it 33% larger than its binary equivalent. Also, I don't know what format the binary data is in, but could it be compressed more?
Different Provider (Score:3, Interesting)
UCB campus bandwidth discussion on Usenet (Score:3, Informative)
UCB net admins and other interested parties have been discussing how to deal with the increased bandwidth demand on the ucb.net.discussion newsgroup: Google Groups thread: "latency from off-campus" [google.com].
I live across the street from the Berkeley CS building where half the EECS servers are housed, and my connection to those machines can get pretty lagged. Having an inconsistent ISP certainly exacerbates the situation, but my experience with off-campus latencies has been quite bad for the past two years.
Sure it's sad that Seti@home users can't use their computer's idle cycles quite so effortlessly anymore, but the bigger picture is that everyone trying to connect off-campus is suffering, especially people who are trying to get work done.
The surprising thing for me is that detaching the dorm network (with all the student-run servers) leaves very few computers that could be sucking up all the bandwidth. We've suffered through DoS attacks from time to time, but the fact that Kazaa is still the number one bandwidth hog makes me wonder who runs these apps (professors? grad students? janitors?) and where are they running them from (lab computers aren't the best places to store all that warez, mp3s, and divx files, unless you don't care that they all get erased every day).
Internet 2 (Score:3, Informative)
Now, since this equipment has been in place since the middle of last summer, Why are they using their dual 45Mb/s connection? Just get some cable dogs out there to run some fiber. Hell, I'll get out there and run some fiber for them. Remember when some yahoo's cut their fiber while stealing copper to recycle? They were down for like two weeks. Well, it took them two weeks to run fiber across the campus again. If they get started now, they could have as much bandwidth as they could possible want by running fiber to their Internet 2 pop.
I have seen the I2 Pop at the Sonoma county office of education. It is running at OC-3 (155Mb/s). That means a bunch of elementary schools have twice the bandwidth as the most prestigious Computer Science program currently running in the world. Prestigious? Yes, they have effectively harnessed millions of desktops to create the fastest computer on the planet by a huge margin. They push 27 Tflop/s on 25 Mb/s compared to ASCI White that just passed 10 Tflop/s. My computers, like every body else's, have wasted a lot of cycles waiting for data. Imagine if they had 2,448 Mbp/s available to them and enough users to create the first 2+ giga-flops computer. Of course they would need 240 million users to achieve that.
Just to be a pessimist, that is probably exactly what all the distributed modules in Win2K/XP are for. Bill is going to have a really nice computer one of these days.
Read the Berkeley netadmin's presentation (Score:2, Interesting)
In fact, you can look here [nlanr.net] to get the story on what various universities are doing to manage traffic.
One possible solution is to run SETI proxies at other universities that will route the traffic to Berkeley via Internet2, since that traffic is free and isn't being regulated/restricted. However, this may not work given that the problem is with transmitting the large data sets to clients, rather than receiving their relatively small responses.
A linux workunit cache! (Score:4, Informative)
This wasn't very hard to see coming, but its still unfortunate.
For those who are looking for a workunit-caching program for linux, I've written a perlscript which has done a quite good job at it. I've decided to release it tonight, to help everyone out, but its a bit rough on the edges. It does the job, though. Read the README, download it here [glines.org]. Also, mirrors are welcome - my connection sucks far worse than theirs does =)
UPDATE: Re:A linux workunit cache! (Score:2)
I've also created an actual webpage for it.
You can find it here. [glines.org]
Re:A linux workunit cache! (Score:2)
My main goal at this point is to finish setiwatch, which is a small Gtk+-using script to show you workunit status of every node of a SETI farm. It works right now, but its not perfect yet =)
.nl Universities should be able to help ou (Score:2, Interesting)
Mysterious Bandwidth usage increase (Score:2)
I mean, surely they have ruled out file-sharing services etc. They wouldn't overlook something so simple. (slight sarcasm intended.) Data isn't something that leaks out of Ethernet wire, it has to go SOMEWHERE. At worst, it's a bug that needs fixing.
Re:Isn't SETI@home just a waste of bandwidth and C (Score:2, Insightful)
1) The point isn't necessarily to find aliens with, as you described it "SUPERIOR technology", but any sign of intellegent life. I.e. any race that has sufficent technology to emit a signal capable of reaching earth (and that limitation only because we currently can't do much better).
they'd have the means to contact us
2) What do you base this upon? (Aside from SciFi movies?) We simply don't know if it's possible at all or even how long it would take a civilization to reach that point. We've had radio for over 100 years, and we don't know how to contact other alien civilizations. How do we know it won't be another 10,000 years until we can.
Personally, I find it an excellent use of my spare cpu cycles. You're free to take yours where you wish.
-Bill
Re:Isn't SETI@home just a waste of bandwidth and C (Score:3, Insightful)
What if they're at the same level as we are? Then they're hard to find, easy to lose in the background noise, and may not even realize we're looking for them.
"Would it be more practical/feasible to donate those spare cpu cycles elsewhere???"
Maybe, but it will be limited. The cancer research screen saver you mentioned won't work on anything truly meaningful - after all, there's money in cancer research and nothing sensitive will be allowed out like that. A cure for any type of cancer will be worth billions to the lab that puts it together. They won't risk a competitor installing a screen saver and starting to sift data...
Other applications for distributed computing that start to involve money end up with the same problem - people don't want to donate their electricity & time so someone else can get rich, and I haven't seen any for-profit distributed program that would let me break even on the electricity cost to run the client 24/7.
So non-commercial stuff like SETI or crack the latest encryption scheme will always be the ones most successful. Anyway, the SETI program is starting to spin off other pure science radio astronomy uses for the data, so it's not just little green men anymore.
That's not the point, you fool. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:OMFG (Score:2, Offtopic)
"Here, we've sent you a bunch of preprinted address labels with your name and address on them which you never asked for and can use while sending out snail mail. We ask that you donate $10 for some poor kids because we need to make up for the costs of sending out these mailers."
No, I'm not making this up!
Re:idiodic!!! (Score:2)
Re:First Bowie Post (Score:2, Interesting)
did you come up with it while you were waiting for your seti@home client to finish its processing so that it could flush and you could see if SetiQueue really works? that would kinda make it not offtopic.
now if you would've done commander tom, and wrote it about both a troll/first poster and seti@home, then i'd give you mad props.