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SETI@home is in hibernation

setiathome.berkeley.edu

331–340 of 358 posts

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#331
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another option is to get the iPad (and magic keyboard and pencil) and remote desktop into your home machine. Put it behind a VPN, use wake-on-lan and boom, iPad is essentially a fully blown computer.

No, that would turn it into a fully blown thin client. What is the point of having half a TB of storage, however many gigs of RAM, lidar, radar, sonar, and the best processor architecture money can buy to render a glorified, interactive video? I would like to be able to write code without having to pay the price of internet latency. I don't need a $1000 tablet to render RDP.

Termux on Android does what you're asking for, but I doubt it's what you actually want. shrugs

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#332
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is but compared to keeping poorly insulated buildings at 70f in the winter or all the forced, unneeded commuting to work it is trivial.

Okay sure but those are vestiges of systems that developed during a huge population explosion, and that have huge retrofit costs. We could turn off all crypto today and it would have no consequences except for people who would lose all their money now instead of in a couple of years when all crypto is worthless anyway.

I've been hearing that crypto will be worthless for 10 years now.

At what point do you start to question if maybe some people find value in it and how you might be able to as well? I'm not talking about getting in on the whole buy low sell high lambo get rich quick scheme thing.

I'm talking about how you can use it in your daily life. I'll assume that since you're on this site that you're probably an engineer, have you looked into writing a smart contract?

Reminds me of this:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/people-had-to-be-c...

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#333
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 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…

51c / kWh?? I pay 20 in Spain even now with the energy crisis.

I think back in those days the price was around 10c

I know this is euro cents but the dollar exchange rate is not too big to make a huge difference.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#335
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If bandwidth wasn't a factor, the first rearchitecture that I think would make sense is to do most of the processing in a single datacenter somewhere. Having one datacenter in West Virginia, one in South Africa, one in New Mexico, one in the California mountains, it introduces a lot of overhead. The systems naturally drift their configurations over time, and nothing is quite as "write once run everywhere" as you'd like.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#336
post #148
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Excellent. I will check that out and see if I can contribute.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#337

Wow, this is sad. I remember when this project was released in 1999 - we installed it on all the workstations in our office in an effort to be the first to find ET. Loved bragging about the cool graph, saying it could be an alien signal. Sad to see the project come to an end, even if it was the distant precursor to things like BitTorrent and Bitcoin

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

Surely they could auction them on eBay for good money.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are these power figures measured at the wall? If so, both are astonishing. My file server with an old Xeon, 16GB RAM and 5x 7200RPM HDDs uses about 95W when idle and about 150W when I throw something at it that works the drives. My desktop with an I7-4770K, 32GB RAM, some SSDs and a single spinner ids about the same. IIRC if I push something compute intensive at it, it can break 200W. OTOH a Pi 4B with 2 7200RPM HDDs…

I don't have a kill-a-watt meter handy anymore, but I do have a smart meter. Guesstimating using that, I hit ~ 850w with my threadripper when compiling and my work project and running a game at the same time, and about 650w when _just_ compiling (so presumably the difference there is GPU being under full load).

They're obviously extreme examples, but on the flip side, I've got an M1 Macbook Pro which lasts an entire day on a single charge of battery including running docker, slack, and some "mild" compiling (not large C++ projects). I'm not sure how to measure the energy consumption of it on battery, but suffice to say it's "very low".

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#339
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you bought $10 USD of it "at the time", you'd have a giant pile of USD. Who is stupid in that lack of purchase? Point is a lot of things are stupid and turn out to work really well. USD is backed by a computer at the Federal Reserve. Sounds pretty stupid but it works.

Hindsight is 20/20 ... I bought my BTC at 0.20€ ... Sold most of it at 20€, the rest at 200€.

I could have been rich ... but how should I have known.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#340
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you bought $10 USD of it "at the time", you'd have a giant pile of USD. Who is stupid in that lack of purchase? Point is a lot of things are stupid and turn out to work really well. USD is backed by a computer at the Federal Reserve. Sounds pretty stupid but it works.

Oh, I definitely feel stupid for underestimating human stupidity.

>USD is backed by a computer at the Federal Reserve. Sounds pretty stupid but it works.

Pretty much why I think it's stupid as an investment, it's no better than the USD if SHTF. You can't hold it like gold or silver.

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