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SETI@home is in hibernation

setiathome.berkeley.edu

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Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#211

Post by why_only_15 »

gradys wrote: post #26
SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #21

Is it possible to distribute AI training like this so that people could donate their idle processing power to creating a truly open source unencumbered LLM?

It’s harder because gradient descent is usually done with near synchronous updates of the parameters across the whole model on all training hosts.

Yeah, the synchronous updates are a big deal. To get an idea of how much bandwidth this typically takes, Oracle has 1600gbps per node of interconnect with latency very low, guessing in the tens of microseconds. A really good home connection might have 1gbps of interconnect with latency in the tens of milliseconds. The big question is whether we really need all this interconnect -- GPT-JT[1] is a very promising step in this direction. The idea is that we just drop most of the gradient updates and it still works well. Unclear whether this will take off generally -- if it does it would be a huge deal, because 1600gbps of interconnect is very expensive.

[1]: https://www.together.xyz/blog/releasing-v1-of-gpt-jt-powered...

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#212

Post by 411111111111111 »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #171
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.

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. W…

That's a Homeserver, not a Datacenter.

The definition of a Datacenter includes that it's complex, which your given example just isn't

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#213

Post by matthewdgreen »

fho wrote: post #101
Breza wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Once the original Bitcoin OG cypherpunks shifted from “here is an amazing new technology that could do entirely new things” to tweeting about the USD price of Bitcoin, I knew that era was over. I think it was done by ~2015.

The Ethereum research community is still doing very neat cutting-edge things, but they’re a younger generation and didn’t claim to believe in the same principles (only to later disappoint us all.)

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#214

Post by ben_w »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #198
ben_w wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

*waves in British*

• Long-term debt used to buy off the slave owners in 1837 and not getting fully paid down until 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Compensation_Act_1837

• Napoleonic war debt was also still being serviced until 2015: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/repayment-of-26-billion-h...

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#215

Post by makeitdouble »

bboygravity wrote: post #162
makeitdouble wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another way to look at it: there is no miracle solution. It´s easy to look at any situation and say ¨If only they´d _just_ XXX¨. It´s never that simple. Even if you deeply believe your solution is flawless and people ¨just¨ need to be convinced, the very fact that the situation is happening at all is an indication it will be a long and dire fight... > essentially limitless oh well

Counterpoint: France is doing extremely well in Europe and is the only country that is doing well (I'm talking energy-wize). France is a nuclear energy country. So yes, there is 1 pretty great solution to the energy problem and yes it has existed since the 50's..

I'd take your point if French were massively (like 90%) in favor of more nuclear, and saw it as their main energy source for the future centuries. That's definitely not the case [exit: a poll mandated from a nuclear power organisation puts it at 50% of people seeing nuclear plants as a positive asset for the country:

https://www.ouest-france.fr/environnement/nucleaire/sondage-... ]

You can then think what you want of the French people and why they could be dead wrong for not thinking like you, but it's another debate: they'll still want to get out of it if given the time/choice.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#216

Post by [deleted] »

hot_gril wrote: post #57
bitcoinistrash wrote: post #44

Earlier 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.

Yeah, cryptocurrency stuff is the closest I've ever felt today to the spirit of the old internet.

[deleted]

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#217

Post by astrange »

saagarjha wrote: post #174
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…

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?

Everything in California is explained by boomers voting themselves out of paying taxes. In this case the regulator never let them raise prices for maintenance so it's all coming due now.

(PG&E is basically nationalized already, they don't make their own decisions here.)

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#218

Post by johnyzee »

SECProto wrote: post #70
hot_gril wrote: post #57

Earlier 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.

The 'old internet' was chuck full of hucksters and scammers and 'futurists' selling snake oil, at least from circa 1993 onward and in full bloom since around the time of the Netscape IPO. It was pretty much exactly like the crypto industry, a core of real technologists doing amazing stuff, and then a whole industry of scammy sales people on top of it.

If you are talking about pre-web, I'd say crypto had that era too, up until around 2012 when bitcoin really took off.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#219

Post by BrandoElFollito »

411111111111111 wrote: post #212
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. W…

That's a Homeserver, not a Datacenter. The definition of a Datacenter includes that it's complex , which your given example just isn't

Sorry, I was trying to be funny with the datacenter, using that word together with cupboard upper shelf and my equipment :)

This may have been funny for people who know me and my 30n years of work with real datacenters.

This is also an example of how badly written words on internet convey emotions (especially humour)

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#220

Post by SiempreViernes »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #15

It seems the aliens are already here, so not much need for SETI anymore. More seriously though, it appears there was some unresolved difficulty in searching and analyzing the data returned from the network, to the point the scientists working on it gradually threw in the towel and moved on to other projects. https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85996 https://einsteinathome.org/content/can-we-run-setiho…

That post is talking about the effort to quantify the upper limits SETI@home can set, the actual reason stated is more like that they just scanned everything they could think of and it wouldn't be very cost effective to go over things again given the probabilities involved:

> Posted Mar 2020, 21:16:23 UTC

> On March 31, the volunteer computing part of SETI@home will stop distributing work and will go into hibernation.

> We're doing this for two reasons:

> 1) Scientifically, we're at the point of diminishing returns; basically, we've analyzed all the data we need for now.

> 2) 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.

https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85267

Description of the final job remaining:

> The final output of Nebula is a bunch of score-ranked lists of multiplets. We already know that some fraction of these will be RFI of the sort that's apparent to a human observer, but hard to identify algorithmically. That's OK. The goal our RFI algorithms is not to remove 100% of RFI; doing so would probably remove ET signals too. The goal is to remove enough RFI that a good fraction (say, at least half) of the top-ranking multiplets are not obvious RFI. The final (post-Nebula) stages of SETI@home are

> Manually examine the top few thousand multiplets, in all the various categories and score variants, and remove the ones that are obvious RFI. At least initially we'll do this as a group, on Zoom, to make sure we agree on what constitutes obvious RFI.

> Make a list of the multiplets that remain; re-observe those spots in the sky (hopefully using FAST), analyze the resulting data (probably using the SETI@home client running on a cluster) and see if we find detections consistent with the multiplets. If we do, maybe that's ET.

https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85756

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