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SETI@home is in hiberation

setiathome.berkeley.edu

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Re: SETI@home is in hiberation

#81

Post by ragebol »

organsnyder wrote: post #68
GuB-42 wrote: post #60

I remember at the time that donating CPU time was considered trivial. Not so much today. At the time of SETI@home, a typical CPU used maybe 20W at full load, fans usually ran at constant speed, and power management was much more primitive. So you barely noticed the difference between idle and full load, both on your electricity bill and on the noise the PC made. Now hundreds of watts is not uncommon if you also use t…

My homelab is in a closet that has the water meter for my above-garage apartment. Before I put a heater in the garage itself, I needed to make sure that that closet didn't freeze. I rigged up a temperature sensor to start mprime on a server if the temperature got too low, but higher than the electric heater that's also in that closet. I figured I might as well contribute to research if I'm just burning watts for heat…

Where can I buy a compute-for-heat home system?

Edit: I have a heat pump, which is more efficient for heating of course

Re: SETI@home is in hiberation

#82

Post by bluGill »

Alex-Programs wrote: post #73
bluGill wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends. If there is "someone" within 20 light years advanced enough to detect our signals we can establish communication and learn from each other - the 40 year round trip time means we can only ask long term questions, but just sending all of human knowledge, and them returning with their knowledge can be a big leg up for both (though sorting through all the things we already know will be a big effort). They m…

Is there a reason we would need to coordinate on what to exchange rather than, say, beginning with encyclopedias and textbooks then moving to a constant stream of notable papers, news, discoveries, etc? What kind of bandwidth can you hit with a cooperating neighbour where improvements become civilisationally important? How many bytes (megabytes? Terabytes?) of meaningful new data does humanity produce per second? I s…

Good question. My thought is similar to yours, but there is a lot of room for debate on what to send. They probably don't care about the roman empire like we do - but there are enough references in modern science that we need to send a summary just so they understand some things. We produce a lot of data, but most of it isn't meaningful.

if this is a real situation I wouldn't be asked. So use salt

Re: SETI@home is in hiberation

#83

Post by speedgoose »

ragebol wrote: post #81
organsnyder wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My homelab is in a closet that has the water meter for my above-garage apartment. Before I put a heater in the garage itself, I needed to make sure that that closet didn't freeze. I rigged up a temperature sensor to start mprime on a server if the temperature got too low, but higher than the electric heater that's also in that closet. I figured I might as well contribute to research if I'm just burning watts for heat…

Where can I buy a compute-for-heat home system? Edit: I have a heat pump, which is more efficient for heating of course

You might prefer a heat pump.

Re: SETI@home is in hiberation

#84

Post by mh- »

ragebol wrote: post #81
organsnyder wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My homelab is in a closet that has the water meter for my above-garage apartment. Before I put a heater in the garage itself, I needed to make sure that that closet didn't freeze. I rigged up a temperature sensor to start mprime on a server if the temperature got too low, but higher than the electric heater that's also in that closet. I figured I might as well contribute to research if I'm just burning watts for heat…

Where can I buy a compute-for-heat home system? Edit: I have a heat pump, which is more efficient for heating of course

A late model Intel MacBook from eBay and pretty much any Electron app from 2020 should do it.

Re: SETI@home is in hiberation

#87

Post by ragebol »

speedgoose wrote: post #83
ragebol wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where can I buy a compute-for-heat home system? Edit: I have a heat pump, which is more efficient for heating of course

You might prefer a heat pump.

I do and have one actually. I have no idea if a kWh of compute could be worth more than eg. a kWh/(heat pump COP) though. Probably not...

Re: SETI@home is in hiberation

#88

Post by rtkwe »

catigula wrote: post #75
rtkwe wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dad did a similar thing with a bunch of computers at his store. It made way more sense back when processors didn't clock down efficiently so there was such a thing as 'wasted/excess clock cycles' you could donate to a distributed computing project. Now though processors shut off cores, reduce their clock speed etc so there's a lot less spare processing power you can siphon off without increasing power draw.

People were doing this as a donation, not because they perceived it to be free.

True but it was much cheaper when a computer you might have on for other reasons wouldn't consume noticeably more power for your donation, eg computer lab admins which I think made up some of the top contenders of the leader boards. There were definitely groups that would run clusters of computers just for the donation (my dad was one of those too, there was no other reason to run those PCs other than Seti@Home) but for the average home user it was spare cycles that were low cost to free.

Re: SETI@home is in hiberation

#89

Post by ckozlowski »

jomohke wrote: post #17

It looks like folding@home is still going https://foldingathome.org/ I'm quite surprised these are still around as I hadn't seen them mentioned in so long. I always assumed the phase out of screensavers (and introduction of CPU low power modes) were terminal for them.

They saw a huge uptick in users during the COVID pandemic. As the corona virus is a protein shell, and their software folds protein molecules, they were able to apply it to look for targets for other molecules to attach to the virus where it would normally latch onto a cell, this could then lead to treatments.

They'd found some promising results, and were working with a pharmaceutical company to manufacture the first compounds that could then be tested. Unfortunately that company's facility was located in eastern Ukraine. =(

But that aside, they've still been going strong.

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