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SETI@home is in hibernation

setiathome.berkeley.edu

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Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#171

Post by BrandoElFollito »

porknubbins wrote: post #69
_yb2s wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power and cooling were at fixed levels and computers couldn’t really sleep, so cpu cycles were just wasted without seti@home. Nowadays computers idle efficiently, so something like that would make your computer louder and more expensive to run.

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.

I have a datacenter at home (that is, the top shelf of a cupboard) with my fiber connection, router, a 10 years old tower with a mix of HDD and SDD, a small computer that acts as the router/DHCP/... and a few other equipment - behind a UPS.

I measured the consumption at some point and it is a steady 60W.

I expected more, this setup has a marginal consumption compared to other appliances - and it gives me happiness.

Without doing advanced research, I would guess that a lot of consumption i fixed and hardly compressible (fridge, dishwasher, water boiler, induction plate, typical lights) - at least I hope so.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#172

Post by Izkata »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #127
nprateem wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The psyops around UFOs must rank as one the most effective ever launched for prejudicing people against the subject.

Are people really prejudiced against aliens and UFO’s though? Aside from the fringe conspiracy theorists fretting about lizard people, and the few claiming to have been abducted, most people seem ambivalent. Largely because whatever the UFOs/UAPs are, they’ve been around for almost a century now, and for all that time almost entirely benign. No invasion, no conquering, no stripping the Earth of resources, no enslavin…

"UAP" became a term because officers stopped reporting them because of the stigma against UFOs.

I think I remember there even being another new term to replace UAP.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#173

Post by gambiting »

ge96 wrote: post #133
kelnos wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last time I ran SETI@home (and Folding@home), I had a fixed desktop machine that I always left on, and I think it was old enough that the fan speeds weren't variable, so it was just constant background white noise. In that context, running those apps in the background all day and all night was fine, and if they ever noticeably interfered with performance while I was using the machine, pausing them for a bit was e…

I run fold@home I'm at 207M points... Sucks I'm in 14K range... I'll probably never hit #1 haha

I'm at 466M points and within top 10k donors.....that's just thanks to running folding@home on my own machines for the last 15 years lol.

https://stats.foldingathome.org/donor/id/9171

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#174

Post by saagarjha »

kelnos wrote: post #128
ETH_start wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that energy hasn't gotten more affordable really demonstrates a deficiency of planning. We've had access to a source of energy that is cheap, zero-carbon and essentially limitless, since the 1950s: nuclear power.

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…

What doesn't make sense to me is why this delivery charge keeps going up? Is it just PG&E throwing a fit about having to modernize its lines so they don't cause fires anymore?

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#175

Post by fho »

RobotToaster wrote: post #156
fho wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin was "old internet" tech at some point. Just for reference, I bought my first BTC at 0.20 €/BTC. Back then it looked like the future to a lot of us ... "hey! We/Hackers can make our own money. And it is superior to state issued money!" ... looking back, it honestly it is somewhat to see the state of cryptocurrencies today.

I thought it was a dumb idea at the time, that nobody would be stupid enough to invest in. I still think it's a dumb idea, but I've learnt not to underestimate human stupidity.

See ... Back then we thought that it would be replacing cash. Some friends and I were thinking about having wallets in smart cards (technically possible) and distributing BTC terminals to local businesses.

The whole crazy investment thing came much later and basically destroyed any hope of using BTC on a daily basis.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#178

Post by saagarjha »

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?

The employee computers got put on the cloud, which let them be shared.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#179

Post by ETH_start »

iopq wrote: post #134
ETH_start wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that energy hasn't gotten more affordable really demonstrates a deficiency of planning. We've had access to a source of energy that is cheap, zero-carbon and essentially limitless, since the 1950s: nuclear power.

First, the costs of nuclear power are quite substantial AND they are front-loaded making it a bad investment. You will need to go through a lot of red tape and spend all the money right away to get some benefit later when it's built. Second, it's not zero carbon if you include building the plants, since the plants have a limited lifespan, so there's still a carbon footprint for the materials. Third, if you switch all…

>>Third, if you switch all of our energy to nuclear today with a magic switch, we would run out of all easy to mine uranium in a few decades.

There are vast quantities of uranium in ocean water in concentrations that while low, still allow it to be extracted. More importantly, breeder reactors can harvest 100X more energy from uranium than currently deployed reactor types, and in the process eliminate all of the long-lasting nuclear waste, i.e. those with a half life of millions/billions of years.

With known supplies of uranium and thorium on Earth, nuclear fission can provide 100% of humanity's current energy needs for something like 2 billion years. For reference, the sun's rising luminosity is expected to boil Earth's oceans away in 900 million years. We could 1000X current energy consumption with nuclear, and have enough fuel on Earth for over a million years. Long before the fuel runs out, we will be able to exploit resources beyond Earth.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#180

Post by dustymcp »

kelnos wrote: post #126
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…

The last time I ran SETI@home (and Folding@home), I had a fixed desktop machine that I always left on, and I think it was old enough that the fan speeds weren't variable, so it was just constant background white noise. In that context, running those apps in the background all day and all night was fine, and if they ever noticeably interfered with performance while I was using the machine, pausing them for a bit was e…

I just cant get a laptop i feel comfortable working on, they all have that slow feel, where a desktop is just crisp and i can always just switch out anything i dont like about the current build..
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