Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SETI@home is in hibernation

setiathome.berkeley.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 358 posts

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#141

Post by bunabhucan »

latchkey wrote: post #120
jeromegv wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That hydro that went to you couldn’t be shared to the connected network and they had to power the rest of the network with gas instead. Unless you built your own dam, which I really doubt you did. Also unused hydro accumulates in the lake, so it’s not like hydro was wasting away and needed to be used.

The only users of the power in the area are data centers. The power goes directly there. The same data centers you're using to access services on the internet. There is more than enough hydro in the area so they don't have to turn on the gas. Very large river based hydro and the dams were built long ago.

I don't know if you know this but electricity can travel through conductors to other places.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#142

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

Breza wrote: post #82

I have a tangential question. I remember distributed processing being a "next big thing" back in the day. The idea was that a company could run complex operations by borrowing some power from all their employee's computers. Seti@home proved the concept was possible. So what happened? Why can't I train a random forest across all the computers currently logged into my company's VPN?

because it's probably easier to write the code to run on a single 256 core server with 8tb of RAM.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#143

Post by bombela »

bunabhucan wrote: post #135
kelnos wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After looking at my utility bill, less than half of the cost is electricity and natgas; the rest is delivery charges -- that is, paying to maintain the power grid itself. Assuming the utility is breaking that down more or less honestly, reducing the cost of electricity here probably wouldn't decrease my utility bill as dramatically as one might guess. (And I live in California, where electricity prices are notoriousl…

>Assuming the utility is breaking that down more or less honestly ... >And I live in California, This made me laugh out loud. (Worked with utilities all my life, including in CA.)

I have had around 13 power outages this week. I live right in the middle of Silicon Valley. Most of the charges from PG&E are indeed the grid charges, the rest is supposedly a mandatory green energy. This is depressing.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#146

Post by Eduard »

KerrAvon wrote: post #97
porknubbins wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m probably about median age for HN and when I was looking into folding Seti@home I had no idea and didn’t worry about power cost because it was subsidised by my parents or university. Plus energy was cheaper then. Now as an adult seeing a month of a few GPUs running on the utility bill really hurts.

Solar panels.

Rental apartment.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#148

Post by j5155 »

xtracto wrote: post #77
rurp wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What you’re describing is http://chat.petals.ml/

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#150

Post by iancmceachern »

fsckboy wrote: post #25

I don't specifically miss SETI@home as much as I miss the spirit of the internet back then, the "what will they think of next!?" The idea that all of us could together could crack RSA keys wasn't just a thought exercise, people signed up and did it. Now computers are so complex and task heavy and fraught with problems it seems like more hassle than it's worth. I liked when wondering "why is my machine so slow", that…

Totally. Now it feels like the internet is more about exploiting people for profit.
Post reply on HN