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SETI@home is in hibernation

setiathome.berkeley.edu

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Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#191

Post by kalleboo »

dustymcp wrote: post #180
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 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..

My MacBook Pro with M1 Pro is the first laptop I've had that hasn't had that slight hesitation that laptops have always had. I think this is why people praise Apple Silicon so much even though the benchmark numbers may not always back it up - so many other people are also coming from similarly-hobbled laptops.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#192

Post by seanp2k2 »

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 remember when power wasn’t 51c/kWh and a powerful PC didn’t suck down >1000w. I know we get way more perf/watt these days, but I don’t feel as a user like that translates into a notably better experience. For most things for $work, Slack, Spotify, GMail, Google Docs, and VSCode feel a lot less responsive than irssi, Winamp, Sylpheed, OpenOffice, and $ide_of_choice did a decade or two ago.

What Dr. Lisa Su giveth, Satya taketh away I suppose.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#193

Post by andyjohnson0 »

nprateem wrote: post #112
pmarreck wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a veteran, can confirm this language. In fact, the weirdest thing to me about the announcement was that... nobody cared. And yet, this made sense, because... Wildly speculating, I think there's been a big systematic desensitization program going on due to that being effective against phobias (such as this one, which I'll call "astroxenophobia"): https://www.healthline.com/health/systematic-desensitization If the…

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

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

I struggle to believe that UFOs are objectively real because I have a basic grasp of the size of the universe, how much of it is just empty, how hard it is to travel between the bits that aren't, how inhospitable almost all of it is to organic life, and because everywhere we look it seems primordial and uninhabited. I don't think that is prejudice.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#194

Post by esperent »

yieldcrv wrote: post #89
esperent wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

for a fraction of a percent of the problem that isn't even in use anymore? misdirected angst

[flagged]

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#195

Post by ETH_start »

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…

I'm guessing much of that delivery cost is due to the additional energy transmission and storage infrastructure needed to incorporate intermittent energy from solar/wind.

Solar and wind are extremely expensive when all costs are taken into account. One study found that the "true cost of using wind and solar to meet demand was $272 and $472 per MWh": [pdf]https://web.archive.org/web/20220916003958/https://files.ame...

Mind you, this could change if we get an economical way to generate hydrocarbon fuels from renewable electricity, so I'm certainly not pessimistic about solar/wind's long term prospects.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#196

Post by seanp2k2 »

dustymcp wrote: post #180
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 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..

Part of the problem is just raw TDP. There’s only so much horsepower you can squeeze out of 45-65w laptop chips. The brand new Ryzen 9 7945HX is damn fast though, with 16 real cores on a way better node size than Intel is using for their 13th gen parts that, at most, get you 8 real cores plus a 16-core Atom on the same die. Stuff like the Asus Zephyrus Duo have RAID-capable m.2 (and that one has two screens, one of which is a 16:10 with high refresh). Get something with a dedicated GPU as well, as that makes a huge difference even for desktop compositing. Despite what Intel says, integrated graphics continue to be a joke compared to even budget dedicated graphics. These mobile workstations are not going to rival 1kw desktops, but they get within 40% or so. The Intel stuff, 12th and 13th gen in particular also get bad battery life, like 4ish hours. Blame the FAA for their 100wh limit on batteries — not many laptop mfgs want to make something that you can’t technically take on a plane, even if the mall cop TSA agents wouldn’t ever notice.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#197

Post by seanp2k2 »

kalleboo wrote: post #191
dustymcp wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

My MacBook Pro with M1 Pro is the first laptop I've had that hasn't had that slight hesitation that laptops have always had. I think this is why people praise Apple Silicon so much even though the benchmark numbers may not always back it up - so many other people are also coming from similarly-hobbled laptops.

Agree, I’ll probably never buy another Intel laptop as long as AMD and Apple keep killing it with these things. I was hopeful that the Surface laptops would be good with ARM too but they’re not using the latest chips, they went for low/mid-tier performance, and Windows on ARM still sucks / relies too much on emulation to be fast. Some day maybe we’ll get REAL ARM hardware with dozens of cores, tons of memory bandwidth, USB4, and decent freaking GPUs. Sorry, but the idea of spending $2k on a laptop that runs last year’s mid-tier smartphone processor just doesn’t cut it. Maybe that’s fine for a Chromebook for schools or something.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#198

Post by seanp2k2 »

ben_w wrote: post #182
saagarjha wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Or, alternatively, that they were only so low before this because someone decided to skip maintenance for 50 years.

Ah, the good old pass-the-buck-to-my-future-self strategy that is leaving the US with trillions in infra repair bills to be paid by my (millennial) generation and younger.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#199

Post by acjacobson »

lacker wrote: post #165
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?

Nowadays a modern radio telescope, let's take MeerKAT in South Africa, can produce maybe 10T of data per minute. The total bandwidth out of the site is orders of magnitude less, because it's in the middle of nowhere in the desert. Same thing for pretty much all the radio telescopes - the technology improves over time, and we capture orders of magnitude more data, but the internet connections to these remote locations…

If bandwidth wasn't a limiting factor would it be worth it or still make sense to use big machines onsite?

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#200

Post by Akronymus »

eru wrote: post #157
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.

I agree that nuclear power would have been great. However it's no deficiency of planning. It's down to public opinion and misguided regulation.

Better not to build one than building a nuclear power plant and then just not turning it on.

Zwentendorf was such a disaster.

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