SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
bleepingcomputer.com
SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
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Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#2I have wondered about folding@home as well, another distributed project begun in another age that seems not, from the outside, to have lived up to its early hype. In the meantime, it seems that Alphafold has surpassed conventional efforts at understanding protein folding, including folding@home's. https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold-casp...
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#3Anectdata: I set up an old computer with this in 2009, but a few months later I heard about this thing called cryptocurrency mining...
EDIT: The article notes that they are reaching a point of diminishing returns with the distributed nature of the SETI@HOME tasks, but I can't help wondering if things like crypto had an impact on participation with this and other @HOME-style academic projects[0].
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#4Anectdata: I set up an old computer with this in 2009, but a few months later I heard about this thing called cryptocurrency mining... EDIT: The article notes that they are reaching a point of diminishing returns with the distributed nature of the SETI@HOME tasks, but I can't help wondering if things like crypto had an impact on participation with this and other @HOME-style academic projects[0]. [0]: https://boinc.be…
How did that do for you?
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#5Anectdata: I set up an old computer with this in 2009, but a few months later I heard about this thing called cryptocurrency mining... EDIT: The article notes that they are reaching a point of diminishing returns with the distributed nature of the SETI@HOME tasks, but I can't help wondering if things like crypto had an impact on participation with this and other @HOME-style academic projects[0]. [0]: https://boinc.be…
Were you able to keep the wallet files well into the next decade? It was fraught with disaster back then, I read about a lot of regret.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#6Anectdata: I set up an old computer with this in 2009, but a few months later I heard about this thing called cryptocurrency mining... EDIT: The article notes that they are reaching a point of diminishing returns with the distributed nature of the SETI@HOME tasks, but I can't help wondering if things like crypto had an impact on participation with this and other @HOME-style academic projects[0]. [0]: https://boinc.be…
I'm not an expert in either this or cryptocurrency, but it always seemed like these two would be a good marriage of technologies rather than having crypto mining rigs waste resources on unproductive proof of work algorithms. Does anyone know why that wasn't feasible or didn't catch on?
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#7I can remember my high school science teacher sometime between 2001-2002 telling us about this project and you'd see this running on his computer any time he wasn't using it.
I always wondered what came out of it and how cool it felt to feel like you could, as an individual, help support something massive by doing something so small.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#8In case anyone reads the headline and thinks that the SETI research center itself is shutting down, or that the project failed in some way:
> "It's a lot of work for us to manage the distributed processing of data. We need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results we already have, and writing this up in a scientific journal paper," their news announcement stated.
Maybe it's PR speak, but it does make sense to me that there'd be a point of diminishing returns where enough data has been processed.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#9I had the brilliant experience of visiting the Allen Telescope Array and meeting Jill and her husband before the announcement of their $100MM donation a few years ago. I have to say that it is an incredibly lean operation ran by the smartest people I've ever met. The @HOME project was more about being able to help handle throughput they would've otherwise just had to dump. I think it makes sense to sit back and spend time reevaluating what's been collected such that the filters can be evolved into something more efficient. I don't think they've spent time seriously trying to apply AI, yet. I'd be eager to hear their opinions on the subject.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#10I worked in a debt collection center where all the call center people used Linux workstations running wy60 terminals and a custom check viewer I wrote in Java (had to reverse engineer our vendors that I did get working in Wine, but it crashed a lot).
Installations and updates were automated. After getting the company logo and xplanet in the background, I got permission to put SETI@Home and FOLDING@Home on the machines (I think I did half and half). After all the machines were barely doing anything other than terminals and rendering TIFFs. Our company name was listed as the team.
Looks like the stats are off line for SETI@Home teams .. wonder how much that cluster kept contributing after I left.