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SETI@home is in hibernation

setiathome.berkeley.edu

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Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#271

Post by latchkey »

ifni wrote: post #153
bunabhucan wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not everything is connected to the grid, you know. Here's an example of a single hydro dam a LONG way from the grid which (pre-Cryptocurrency gold rush) had 12 MW of unused power generation capacity plus they were talking up the possibility of adding an additional 20 MW of generation. https://www.hydroreview.com/business-finance/boralex-acquire... It's not going to be the only one.

You are correct. There is one in upstate new york as well. An old Alcoa smelter factory powered off the Moses-Saunders dam. It is so remote and sparsely populated that transmitting the power elsewhere is just too expensive. I've even seen their energy bills and the transmission costs alone are insane.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#272

Post by peterleiser »

LinuxBender wrote: post #73
peterleiser wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The open source aspect is a good point. I'm guessing the team thought making the source open would increase the risk of cheating; misguided I know, but cheaters were a pain in the neck at first.

Many of the folks there were into music (in bands, wrote music related software, etc), so I'm guessing the signals were boring to listen to.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#273

Post by maccard »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #268
seanp2k2 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, S…

> a powerful PC didn’t suck down >1000w My Ryzen Threadripper 2950X, which isn't a top-of-the-line system at this point, but is still a 16 core beast-ish machine, sucks down (much) less than 400W

My 3990x is almost 500w. My last dual socket Xeon workstation was closer to 750w.

That's before you add on a GPU. My 3080 uses 350w under load.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#274

Post by maccard »

flangola7 wrote: post #253
seanp2k2 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, S…

Powers is around $0.10/kWh for residential, even lower for industrial

It's closer to 50c/kWh here in the UK [0]

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/energy-bills-supp...

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#275

Post by latchkey »

dools wrote: post #249
latchkey wrote: post #74

This 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…

Fucking hell crypto is such a colossal waste of resources

In comparison to everything else, it is tiny. All of banking could be significantly automated to the point that we don't need to build physical buildings all over the planet and stuff them full of humans who drive their cars to work every day to take your money and write it down on a ledger. Talk about absurd.

Remember also, this equipment is being turned off because ethereum has grown to be more efficient. It is now proof of stake instead of proof of work and it has been a relatively huge success. Over night, this single change wiped out every single GPU mined network out there by removing all the profitability. That was the plan from day one and I'm glad it worked!

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#276

Post by ChancyChance »

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…

What was the RSA crack effort you mention? It doesn't seem feasible, considering finding a SHA-256 collision would take so much compute power we don't have words to describe it, and even coming up with thoughts to frame the problem is hard (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9JGmA5_unY). I can't imagine cracking even an RSA2048 key with everyone working on it.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#278

Post by latchkey »

esperent wrote: post #194
yieldcrv wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

Ever travel to SE Asia? There are millions of kids that go to gaming centers. They are rooms in shacks, full of computers and they sit there 24/7 playing games online. They are burning electricity non-stop and this is majority coal based energy.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#279

Post by raziel2701 »

tokai wrote: post #110
tablespoon wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is even sadder: https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85870&po...

>those tapes will probably also be discarded as well. Maybe the Berkeley Library would take them.

The UC Berkeley library is getting its funding cut. The physics library and some other have been closed.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#280

Post by tokai »

raziel2701 wrote: post #279
tokai wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>those tapes will probably also be discarded as well. Maybe the Berkeley Library would take them.

The UC Berkeley library is getting its funding cut. The physics library and some other have been closed.

it doesn't cost much to put some shelf meters of tapes in the closed stacks.
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