Berkeley's BOINC Reaches 2B Results Milestone for SETI@Home

[Guest]

The SETI@Home group, a distributed computing project to analyze radio signals that could hold signs of extraterrestrial life, announced that its BOINC platform has successfully crossed the 2 billion recorded results.

Berkeley's BOINC Reaches 2B Results Milestone for SETI@Home : Read more

 

[Guest]

err wtf is this,,,

 

[viper666]

proud SETI@home member since 2005

 

[pharoahhalfdead]

Proud member and active member of Folding@home... something that is actually useful and relevant in todays world.

 

[posteris]

[citation][nom]cathyreen[/nom]distributed computing............................ my neighbor's step-sister makes $87 an hour on the laptop. She has been fired for 10 months but last month her income was $7879 just working on the laptop for a few hours. Read more here... [/citation]

what does she do, 18+ webcam chat?

 

[michalmierzwa]

I remember using the Seti@Home Screensaver, that was awesome way to impress friends and battle it out who can crank out more processed units. Back then I was using analog 56k modem so connecting was a pain in the ass. Nevertheless it was fun. You even got a certificate for participation

 

[EDVINASM]

That is the project to "decipher" noise coming from sky and "check" if that could be some extraterrestrial, right? Not trying to be smart but all these TFlops of performance and enormous amount of electricity (leading to more CO2 emissions) used going for some UFO hunting? Does nobody think that we have more important things to do here, on Earth? Like fight cancer and Alzheimer's? Maybe do some protein folding..?
Sorry if offended anyone, what you guys do with your computers is your own business, just saying that it seems a huge waste in general. Unless there are some solid results out of it? Sure 10+ years of work produced something?

 

[back_by_demand]

Even if they don't find aliens the data can still be used to find other spacial signals like Pulsars and such, Black Holes, etc - if a small packet of raw data that I process at home is used to discover a new Black Hole that is still 10 different flavours of awesome in anyone's book.

 

[lordstormdragon]

[citation][nom]back_by_demand[/nom]Even if they don't find aliens the data can still be used to find other spacial signals like Pulsars and such, Black Holes, etc - if a small packet of raw data that I process at home is used to discover a new Black Hole that is still 10 different flavours of awesome in anyone's book.[/citation]

Except none of that stuff has ever been proven or evidenced to exist, and SETI has practically proven black holes do not - zero results, son. SETI isn't a waste of time because it's stupid, it's a waste of time because it's a pointless waste of electricity which has produced precisely zero results in any direction. Just like all the NASA fanatics ranting about pseudoscientific "black holes". No se existe, kiddo. Never been evidenced. Pulsars are also merely a deduction - never been evidenced and physically impossible, just like black holes. When you divide by zero, guess what you get?

The burden of proof is on the theorist. When it comes to all that Big Bang mythology, it never even made it to the hypothetical stage. Scientific Method. SETIs complete uselessness and utter lack of any tangible data are simply laughable. Not to mention a modern workstation can handle all the math SETI's every pulled in mere hours, if not minutes...

But hey, it's fun to be "involved", especially when you don't have to actually do anything or think at all.

 

[danwat1234]

@edvinasm, the project does much more than just looking for patterns from space audio to see if intelligent life exists out there. This project is the only way to know whether intelligent life does exist elsewhere in the universe by listening, it requires a lot of computational power but it is totally worth it. Doesn't make much sense NOT to listen and see and we need to continue so that we know all areas of the sky have been covered.
The project also searches for black holes, Pulsars and more.

 

[danwat1234]

[citation][nom]michalmierzwa[/nom]I remember using the Seti@Home Screensaver, that was awesome way to impress friends and battle it out who can crank out more processed units. Back then I was using analog 56k modem so connecting was a pain in the ass. Nevertheless it was fun. You even got a certificate for participation [/citation]

I remember using Setidriver to buffer up 50 work units at a time on my dial up

 

[lordstormdragon]

Wrong, Danwat. It requires jack for computational power. It's not a powerful, potent, or complex filtration script at all - think about it. Refer to my above post for the answers to the rest of your mindless questions.

Of course if you're "most people" you don't actually "compute" with your computer. And SETI's a great way to make yourself feel like you did something intelligent, even though it's the weakest possible way to approach detecting life.

The double-layers alone would prevent any incoming signals. If an alien on Jupiter were broadcasting, we'd get jack. It's electricity - not magic.

 

[lordstormdragon]

[citation][nom]danwat1234[/nom]I remember using Setidriver to buffer up 50 work units at a time on my dial up[/citation]

And you found nothing. Hey, good work. Impressive effort, well worth the reward.

 

[EDVINASM]

[citation][nom]danwat1234[/nom]@edvinasm, the project does much more than just looking for patterns from space audio to see if intelligent life exists out there. This project is the only way to know whether intelligent life does exist elsewhere in the universe by listening, it requires a lot of computational power but it is totally worth it. Doesn't make much sense NOT to listen and see and we need to continue so that we know all areas of the sky have been covered.The project also searches for black holes, Pulsars and more.[/citation]

We are not evolved enough to even receive the message if there was ever one. Never mind to communicate back. As for pulsars and black holes leave it to more sophisticated equipment that is n times efficient. Plenty of probes sent for that matter.

 

[danwat1234]

[citation][nom]lordstormdragon[/nom]Wrong, Danwat. It requires jack for computational power. It's not a powerful, potent, or complex filtration script at all - think about it. [/citation]

Here is some information about what is involved, keep in mind the info is old but still relevant. The data analysis now-days is way enhanced from what is shown in this link. http/seticlassic.ssl.berkeley.edu/about_seti/about_seti_at_home_4.html

Jack for computational power? It takes about 3 hours to process a 107 second piece of audio at a very narrow frequency range on a core of my computer, and that's with an SSE4 optimized engine.
Think about it.

@edvinasm, seti@home isn't trying to find voices coming from space, but audio patterns that can't be produced naturally. I agree it would probably be impossible to decrypt the audio even if we got hold of a clean recording. Sending a message back might take centuries because of the speed of sound in space.

 

[freggo]

[citation][nom]edvinasm[/nom]That is the project to "decipher" noise coming from sky and "check" if that could be some extraterrestrial, right? Not trying to be smart but all these TFlops of performance and enormous amount of electricity (leading to more CO2 emissions) used going for some UFO hunting? Does nobody think that we have more important things to do here, on Earth? Like fight cancer and Alzheimer's? Maybe do some protein folding..?Sorry if offended anyone, what you guys do with your computers is your own business, just saying that it seems a huge waste in general. Unless there are some solid results out of it? Sure 10+ years of work produced something?[/citation]

Well, driving 50,000+ people to a $1Billion+ stadium (talk about money for cancer research instead)to see the Cowboys get hammered is certainly not doing much for CO2 emissions either
But seriously, one of the differences of mankind vs. animals is that we do go invest time and resources into endeavors that seem to be senseless and do not bring immediate results.
Most of the things we enjoy today are the result of this. Cars, Airplanes, Rockets and the Internet to name a few.

 

[freggo]

[citation][nom]danwat1234[/nom]Sending a message back might take centuries because of the speed of sound in space.[/citation]

I am sure you meant speed of light as there is no 'sound' in space.

 

[Guest]

To all of the folks who dislike BOINC, please don't tell me you've fallen for F@H?. I assure you they're only doing a minimal amount of folding with your processing power, otherwise F@H would be made open source like BOINC, rather than going to the trouble of convincing the open source software that F@H stole to grant them an exception to make it closed source.

Besides, the medical establishment isn't interested in curing cancer when they can kill you with Chemotherapy instead for $10,000 a month. When was the last time they cured anything? How often do they come up with "treatments" of questionable safety and efficacy, with exorbitant prices? I rest my case, BOINC is a much more noble cause.

 

[sykozis]

BOINC, short for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, has been used by the SETI@Home group since 2008 when Nvidia help to enable the technology through its CUDA interface.

Might want to do some fact checking here. SETI@Home has been using BOINC since at least 2003.

 

[mavroxur]

I quit SETI@Home when i'd go days (and sometimes weeks) without receiving work units, and being unable to send in work units. If they don't care enough to get their system working properly, I don't care enough to do work units. And apparently I wasn't the only one that had these problems, the forums were constantly flooded with it.