Seti@Home

hamster

Anyone here who used to run Seti@home and stopped or who is still running it? It's nearly 4 years old now!

In that time I got 5750 of the units done. It would be cool if someone found something sometime sound... however unlikely that is... but it there would be some reaction to it all the same?

Anyone give up on it or tried a different type, ie molecule designer or whatnot?

Redshift

Yep I do it on and off Don't know what I have up but it's a few thousand hours. I was thinking of trying to set up a boards.ie seti@home see if we could get a few people on board (no pun intended), Anyone interested?

Ryan

hamster

I'd be interested but don't boards.ie have one already?

Redshift

Originally posted by hamster
I'd be interested but don't boards.ie have one already?

Geez If they do I haven't seen sight nor sound of it I will investigate it and we shall have to see about commandering it;) if it exists.

SickBoy

Have a look here and here

Redshift

Nice one SickBoy I'll post it up as a sticky and see if we can renew interest in it, Impressive stats btw makes my own meagre offerings look inconsequental.

Ryan

SickBoy

All donations are welcome

davej

The seti@home project seems to me to be more of PR exercise than anything else. Don't get me wrong, the kind of exposure the project has gotten has been very good for getting funding / grants and has helped rekindle an interest in the search for extra terrestial life and other related areas. But as for the merits of the project itself, I think it's very dubious

davej

Redshift

Originally posted by davej
But as for the merits of the project itself, I think it's very dubious

davej

Why so?

Ryan

davej

There are way too many assumptions made by the project. There are improbabilities on top of huge improbabilities on top of astronomical improbabilities, compounded by the fact that only a miniscule slice of space is being examined.

The bulk of the seti@home website is devoted to all sorts of cool ranking stats, many people are obsessed with "playing the game" and trawling through the stats. If it were really serious science there would be no need to turn it into a carnival.

davej

hamster

Unfortunately how else is one going to attract contributors if no sign of "progress" is given. Even in a everyday "serious" project such as molecule bonding example for parallel computing is going to need stats to give user feedback to keep a project going. Otherwise it's contributor base would die.

vibe666

I used to be a regular poster to another board and I got a team together for that, and we're in the top 400 teams at the moment with 115 members (lots of inactive though) and over 600 work units a day. The teams been going for about a year and a half, so I think it's gone pretty well personally.

I'm not recruiting at all, in fact, if you're doing or thinking of doing seti@home and joining a team, then I would wholeheartedly incourage you to join the one here at boards.ie. It's not a waste of time, it's the examination of radio data which while boring, could prove very fruitful in the long term.

That said, the folding@home (cancer research) is also a very worthwhile cause too, but sincew I started seti@home before folding came on the scene I stuck with seti.

Anway, good luck all, in whatever you do

theres a link to our team stats HERE and HERE if you want to have a look.

Redshift

Jeez thats alot of processoer time:) Seriously though nice work there. Welcome to the forum BTW.

Ryan

vibe666

when I started it, I wasn't expecting anything much to come of it, but within 3 months there were a whole bunch of people joining the team, and I ended up having to put a website together for it and everything.

I have to admit, I've not been on those boards for ages, but I check the stats more or less every week to keep an eye on it all, and I'm still in touch with some of the other members over IM, so I'm still in there doing it, even tho I'm not really posting there much any more.

A good tip for raising the profile of your team is to get all the members that post to the boards to add a seti@home link to their sigs, maybe with a link to the berkeley page and to the seti forum, and then get a sticky post telling them how to set it all up on their PC's.

Do you use the windows screensaver seti@home client or the command line version?

hamster

Myself, I use the cmdline client with seti driver as my cache manager (dial-up don't ya know. ) on my XP box and sebseti cache manager (perl) on a RedHat9 box.

I have 3 members on my own team (no inactive accounts) but I would like to merge with an active team.

Redshift

The boards seti@home team needs your spare CPU cycles there is a thread in the technology forum about the boards team. So join on up and help get board to the top.
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&postid=971301#post971301

Ryan