Anyone up for Llama training?
LLaMA? :)
SETI@home is in hibernation
71–80 of 358 posts
Re: SETI@home is in hibernation
#72If SETI/BOINC wants to rearchitect as an IPFS or I2P app that can also run on k8s CUDA clusters, I know some large HPC shops that may be interested in partnering.
Re: SETI@home is in hibernation
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
We did that as well on a bunch of spare Sun SPARC servers that were considered powerful back in their day. A part of me always wondered if I had been tricked into cracking encryption for the assorted agencies and that this had nothing to do with monitoring the quietest frequency in the galaxy.
Lol! I worked for SETI@home as an undergrad. If something nefarious was going on then my coworkers were extremely good actors, right down to faking an entire codebase and a database filled with processed work units. Hey, I'd probably be suspicious of SETI too if I hadn't worked for SETI. Cheers!
I believe you. I think the missing pieces that triggered those little voices in my head were the lack of the project being open source code at the time and the inability to listen to the signals. I spent my childhood talking on the radio so it just felt like something I should have been able to do.
Re: SETI@home is in hibernation
#74This makes me sad because it reminds me of something similar I just went through.
For the last few years, I've been running >120k gpus to mine ETH. Before we turned them off after ETH switched to PoS, I tried really hard to find an alternative workload for them.
A large number of the GPUs were based on the PS5 chip, which is an APU (CPU+GPU) and ran as blade computers. It is actually a pretty power efficient chip, but the blades themselves are little use for anything that requires a lot of networking or data (they are diskless and ipxe boot a custom ubuntu).
I found a professor who's been doing research on various planetary data crunching efforts and we got his software (I think based on BOINC) running on these blades.
His software is analyzing data from telescopes to look for binary quasars. We crunched the numbers from our proof of concept and estimated that if we dedicated all the GPUs I have of that class, to this one task, that a 1 year of computation would be done in 1 month. At least two people have received Nobel's based on similar findings.
The problem was finding funding to pay for the operating expenses, megawatts of power, so it never got off the ground and the hardware has been turned off and decommissioned. Such a bummer.
Re: SETI@home is in hibernation
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The idea that all of us could together could crack RSA keys wasn't just a thought exercise, people signed up and did it. Hasn’t changed that much. Here we are in 2023 where most of this distributed power goes to cracking sha 256 hashes. Just for speculation and profit instead of leaderboards.
Bitcoin has nothing to do with "cracking SHA256 hashes", for what it's worth. The only thing remotely related is how it brute-forces inputs until it generates hashes that begin with a certain number of bits set to 0.
> hashes that begin with a certain number of bits set to 0.
This myth was always intriguing to me. Where does it come from?
It's not a number of 0s (which would imply difficulty could only be doubled or halved), it's just finding a hash that is less than the target.
Re: SETI@home is in hibernation
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's still not what the Bitcoin miners are doing. They're manipulating inputs, trillions of times a second, just to match a "magic" target for a SHA256 hash starting with a certain number of bits set to 0. Cracking hashes would imply that they're taking pre-existing hashes and reversing them to find the input.
Hashes have multiple requirements for security. You're talking about only one facet, which is that you cannot be given a hash and produce a matching input without consulting a rainbow table (I think there's a term for this, I forget it though).
Chungy is correct though. Bitcoin has absolutely nothing to do with "cracking sha256 hashes". Bitcoin hashes until the correct output is found. There are double hashes, but that is solely to avoid collisions and has nothing to do with determining the plaintext from a known digest.
Re: SETI@home is in hibernation
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
The recent neural network "revolution" is giving me those vibes, even though it'll ironically kill the old internet with the upcoming spam bots.
If it were based on open ended tooling that anyone interested could experiment freely with, I would feel the same. Unfortunately these giant LLMs are almost the complete opposite of that.
I was just thinking that it would be great to do something like seti@home but for an open libre super LLM: Install a client that would help run / train the huge llm and you get Access to the network to do queries. Kind of how napster/Kazaa were at their time.
I would love to work on doing something like that.
Re: SETI@home is in hibernation
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, cryptocurrency stuff is the closest I've ever felt today to the spirit of the old internet.
> cryptocurrency stuff is the closest I've ever felt today to the spirit of the old internet Cryptocurrency feels like the exact opposite of the old internet to me - it feels like a bunch of anonymous bros looking for the next sucker to scam out of money and get rich quick.
I agree with you. The early web was full of amazing opportunities but had trouble monetizing things. Cryptocurrency is the opposite, it tries to monetize everything but doesn't have practical uses.
Re: SETI@home is in hibernation
#79This makes me sad because it reminds me of something similar I just went through. For the last few years, I've been running >120k gpus to mine ETH. Before we turned them off after ETH switched to PoS, I tried really hard to find an alternative workload for them. A large number of the GPUs were based on the PS5 chip, which is an APU (CPU+GPU) and ran as blade computers. It is actually a pretty power efficient chip, bu…
> I've been running >120k gpus to mine ETH
So when the sea levels rise and destroy my home, I'll know who to blame. Thank you.
Re: SETI@home is in hibernation
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hashes have multiple requirements for security. You're talking about only one facet, which is that you cannot be given a hash and produce a matching input without consulting a rainbow table (I think there's a term for this, I forget it though).
Chungy is correct though. Bitcoin has absolutely nothing to do with "cracking sha256 hashes". Bitcoin hashes until the correct output is found. There are double hashes, but that is solely to avoid collisions and has nothing to do with determining the plaintext from a known digest.
>and has nothing to do with determining the plaintext from a known digest.
So why'd you bring it up?