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-   -   OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home (http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=7458)

rdouglass September 24th, 2002 07:57 PM
OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Some of you are aware of the Seti@Home project (using many different computers for SETI). There is a group "Space Empires" that is nearing it's 20,000th work unit. IMO that's quite an accomplishment for just 14 participants. Check it out - you may see a few familiar names...

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/stats...eam_73545.html

sven September 24th, 2002 08:11 PM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Cool, didn't know about that group, I'll join and push you over the 20k mark http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

zen. September 25th, 2002 04:11 PM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
I'm in.

zen

sachmo September 25th, 2002 06:31 PM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
That is so cool!

rdouglass September 25th, 2002 06:53 PM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Cool! Zenbudo and sven pushed us over the 20K mark w/ plenty of room to spare!!! However I don't think the page has completely updated its' calculations.

If anyone hasn't checked out Seti@Home, take a look. It is (as sachmo says) cool!!!

I personally have quite a few work units myself. In fact someone here on another thread suggested I was "heating my house" with it (with all the spare CPU's I have running the process).. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif Reguardless, most if not all that visit these forums probably have some interest in SETI......

Timstone September 25th, 2002 07:02 PM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
I've seen the page now and I don't understand what they mean. What do they mean with 20000+ year cpu time? And what do you mean with plenty room to spare? Please explain.

rdouglass September 25th, 2002 08:42 PM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
It may be better for you to start out at the home page:

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/index.html

Basically Seti@Home is an attempt at discovering ET by analysing radio frequencies across the sky (the web pages do a much better and more thorough job explaining it). Then, breaking up all that data into approx. 330K chunks and distributing a chunk to one of several million participating computers for analysis (1 chunk = 1 "Work Unit"). The remote computers do the analysis (Fast Fourier Transforms, etc.) to look for signs of ET, then return the results and recieve a new chunk for data crunching.

On the page I posted, "Results Recieved" is a count of completed Work Units (or chunks), "Total CPU Time" is (obviously) how long your computer(s) took to process thosw work units, and "Average" is pretty self-explainitory.

"Plenty of room to spare" is just that the group is actually well over 20K work units (not currently displayed but should be updated soon).

dogscoff September 26th, 2002 09:12 AM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Just looked at the link at the start of the thread. who wrote this?

Quote:
Space Empires is a strategy game, similar to the board game Version of Risk.
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Similar to Risk? Like a Space Shuttle is similar to a canoe...

Fyron September 26th, 2002 09:15 AM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Since Paul Dionne (MinervanEmpire) founded the group, it is safe to assume that he wrote that. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

DavidG September 28th, 2002 11:32 PM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Are you guys all running Quad Pentiums X's or what? I joined and my first unit took 44 hrs' to process!! I didn't think my 1Ghz PIII was that slooow! I want Imperator Fyron' or Thermodyne's computer. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Baron Munchausen September 29th, 2002 02:44 AM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
No, you just need to learn the secrets of SETI@Home fanaticism. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

First of all, what Version are you using? The Win95/98 screen saver? Set it to blank the screen after 0 minutes. No, not your screen saver timeout in the Windows settings. The blank screen setting in the actual SETI program. The pretty graphics use as much CPU as the actual calculations. By turning them off you'll save a lot of power. You'll probably more than double the speed at which you finish a work unit just by doing that. A 1 Ghz P III is actually fairly powerful. You could check the box to have it running all the time in the background, I think. I have an 800 Mhz Duron and it's no problem for me to have it running all the time.

Now after that you have to consider how you have configured your computer and what else is running on it. Sounds are cute, but use MUCH CPU time playing unless you've got a fancy sound subsystem with hardware buffering. It would be wise to turn sounds off. Lots of 'harmless' programs that load up and sit in memory waiting for you to do something are actually using a noticable portion of your CPU power. What have you got in your task bar? Think real hard about whether you need those things. Is it really that hard to just go to the menu or desktop icon to activate that program? Remove as many as possible.

There are some more obscure tweaks that will give you a tiny percentage more, like using lower color depth on your screen. But the best improvement will come from not using the screen saver Version at all. Get the Win NT Version, which DOES run in Win95/98, and use that instead. (Then color depth doesn't matter!) It's about 10 percent faster than the Screensaver even with the graphics turned off. I think you will find that everyone on the SE IV group has been using the NT Version for a long time now. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

I suppose I should rejoin the group but I hate the competitiveness of it. It's supposed to be 'fun' and/or 'charity' in that you're donating spare computer power to a good non-profit cause, but it's become a huge competitve thing for so many people now. There are entire farms of computers in some people's basements dedicated to SETI and nothing else. Some 'gift of spare CPU time'... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif But at least they've got the largest accumulated computing project in history now. Just wait till SETI@HOME II starts up for the southern hemisphere... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/shock.gif

[ September 29, 2002, 01:50: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

Thermodyne September 30th, 2002 08:45 AM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Wow, I was wondering where all of the new people were coming from, so now I know. I don’t visit here very often. For the guys looking for faster unit times, run the 3.03 command line Version and a caching program like SetiDriver or one of the others. Then OC the heck out of every old system that you have lying around.

The team was started by one of the SE III masters, Paul Dionne/Minervan Necores Alliance. And while it is a small team, we have a pair of ¼%’rs, and should have 2 people over 10,000 units by Thanksgiving. So come on over and join up, we need all the help we can get http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/s...eam_73545.html

Fyron September 30th, 2002 09:05 AM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Wait... that low average CPU time per work unit is a good thing? I wasn't sure what it meant. Are all of the work units the same size?

Suicide Junkie September 30th, 2002 03:57 PM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
The units are all the same size, but the amount of work done on them has increased in the Last year or two.

A while ago, IIRC, the SETI guys found that people were processing the units TOO fast, and they were going to run out, so they increased the detail of the analysis.

Thermodyne September 30th, 2002 06:10 PM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Quote:
Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
Wait... that low average CPU time per work unit is a good thing? I wasn't sure what it meant. Are all of the work units the same size?
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">No two units are the same. The first Version had work units that were faster to work than the Version we have now, something to do with adding Gaussians I think. So the peeps that got in at the start had some quick units to work on, but with slower systems. The units we work with now vary by as much as 25% depending on the angle of the work unit. I won’t go into all of that here; it has been covered in detail on the seti forum. The key to high output is to have a bunch of systems doing the work, but a few fast systems can put out a lot of units. My slowest system is a P II 300 at about 14:30 a unit. And on the other end of the scale I have a P4 @ 2.8Ghz that does a unit every two hours.

Thermodyne September 30th, 2002 06:21 PM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Quote:
Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:

A while ago, IIRC, the SETI guys found that people were processing the units TOO fast, and they were going to run out, so they increased the detail of the analysis.
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Not true, each unit is worked many times by many different systems, just to make sure that the results are reliable. This also eliminates the need to track lost units. Many of the units that are downloaded never get returned. The biggest problem we have had is when we used up the bandwidth at the UC Berkeley campus. It got real hard to send and receive work units for a few months. But all things must end, and after the first of the year the data from the northern hemisphere will be finished. There are a couple of new projects in the works, but it will remain to be seen if they will be as popular as seti@home is. They should hit 4,000,000 Users this week.

[ September 30, 2002, 17:23: Message edited by: Thermodyne ]

sven September 30th, 2002 07:45 PM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Quote:
Originally posted by Thermodyne:
My slowest system is a P II 300 at about 14:30 a unit.
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Hehe, my slowest is a 486/66 which takes about 480 hours (20 days!) a unit.

sachmo October 2nd, 2002 12:02 AM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Good news, alien hunters!

Quote:

The world's most popular ET-hunting program for home Users is about to get upgrades of both its software and the telescope that feeds data into it.

For three years, SETI@home has used the spare processing power of computers across the world, in the guise of a screensaver, to examine radio telescope data for signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life. The data comes from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which can scan only a 30-degree patch of the sky in the Northern Hemisphere.

Starting early next year, the Arecibo recorder will be shut off and a new but similar recorder will be turned on at the Parkes Observatory in Australia, which can observe 70 degrees of the sky -- and a more advantageous part of the sky, too.



The odds go up for finding ET from the Southern Hemisphere. Why? Because most of our Milky Way Galaxy's stars, in the dense central bulge, are visible only from south of the equator. While northern skywatchers see our galaxy's main disk -- itself rich in stars -- the denser bulge barely rises above the horizon.

And the chances of getting a signal from outside of the Milky Way "is pretty small," says David Anderson, the SETI@home project director at the University of California at Berkeley.

New software

At around the same time as the Parkes Observatory recorder comes Online, SETI@home will also release new software designed to broaden its scientific applications and streamline the program.

The first change expected to come Online is AstroPulse, a program that will scan the three years of Arecibo data stored on tapes for broad band signals, or "a sudden burst of energy that's spread across a wide frequency range," Anderson explained in a recent interview with SPACE.com. The current SETI@home algorithms search for narrow-band signals.

One of the most exciting explanations for such an observation, Anderson says, is the evaporation of quantum black holes, a phenomenon predicted by Stephen Hawking but that has yet to be observed.

According to Hawking's theory, "black holes give off radiation and therefore lose mass," Anderson explains. "So small black holes will basically kind of dry up and go away. In the moment of their disappearance, the theory predicts that they will give up a short burst of broad band radio radiation. Our data from Arecibo is an ideal place to look for that sort of thing."

Going BOINCers

With the release of AstroPulse will come the inauguration of BOINC, or Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Networking Computing.

BOINC, in essence, is "a new layer of software" that separates the different components of the SETI@home program. It will allow changes to be installed without interrupting the screensaver or asking the user to download upgrades.

About 4 million people have downloaded SETI@home, and roughly 600,000 use it on a regular basis. In the past, when new Versions of SETI@home were released and were finally installed by the Users, "it's taken between six months and a year," says Anderson. "BOINC will streamline that."

BOINC will also make it possible to seamlessly integrate different kinds of computing projects into SETI@home, such as programs that analyze biological functions, global warming, or anything else researchers can dream up.

"We're opening things up to the world," Anderson said. "It turns out there are many areas of science…that can also benefit from huge amounts of computer time."

A project called Folding@home, which simulates protein folding and its related diseases, already exists.

Democratizing science

Users will be able to integrate projects such as Folding@home into their desktop Versions of SETI@home by clicking a box, Anderson says. This will also allow Users to divide their processing power between projects. "They won't be forced to choose between one project and another … essentially bringing a form of democracy to science research," Anderson says.

SETI@home was founded in 1995 by David Getty, a former computer science graduate student of Anderson's at Berkeley. The original idea was always to tap into the unused power of computers everywhere for scientific data analysis. But, "to get SETI@home off the ground at all, we really had to limit our ambitions and just try to do things in as simple a way as possible," Anderson says.

With BOINC and the increasing interest of scientists everywhere in this computing power, SETI@home is expanding.

At its core, still, is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And switching to the Parkes Observatory will make work easier for the 5-member SETI@home staff. One of the main tasks of the staff (besides writing software such as BOINC) is to examine any possible extraterrestrial signals detected by the SETI@home program.

Most, if not all of the signals, are a result of television, radio and other signals leaking into the telescope from the one civilization we know to exist.

To solve this problem, SETI@home will take advantage of Parkes' multi-beam receiver. It is one of the first observatories in the world to install one. Instead of examining only one point in the sky at a time, as Arecibo does, Parkes will record data from several.

"If you get a signal that seems to be coming from several points in the sky at one time," Anderson explains, "then it's probably not coming from the sky at all. It's coming from Earth and bouncing off the atmosphere and back into the telescope."

Anderson expects SETI@home Users to begin analyzing Parkes data soon after AstroPulse is released in February or March of next year. But, he adds, "every scheduling prediction that I've made has been way off."
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">

zen. October 2nd, 2002 12:55 AM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Suh-weet! Thanks for the article, Sachmo...I haven't been up to date at all with SETI news.

Which reminds me, I need to download a Win2k SETI@Home Version so I can reinstall after getting my new hard drive.

zen

Thermodyne October 2nd, 2002 02:22 AM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Seti hit 4 MILLION Users today! That’s 4,000,000 for you guys across the pond. I hit 8000 units at almost the same time, should only take about 400k more to get to be #1 http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Mephisto October 2nd, 2002 11:32 AM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Quote:
Originally posted by Thermodyne:
Seti hit 4 MILLION Users today! That’s 4,000,000 for you guys across the pond.
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">I'm just wandering what you think how far we can count across the pond...
"Mmm, 1, 2, 3, many things..." http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

dogscoff October 2nd, 2002 12:10 PM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Quote:
Seti hit 4 MILLION Users today! That’s 4,000,000 for you guys across the pond.
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">A million is a thousand thousand, wherever you are. It's the billion that the UK and US can't agree on. In the UK we liked to think of it as a million millions, but the US Version has always been a thousand million (just to make everything look bigger http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/rolleyes.gif ).

Of course, the US Version is now becoming the standard, just like with everything else. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif

Mephisto October 2nd, 2002 08:17 PM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Quote:
Originally posted by dogscoff:
Of course, the US Version is now becoming the standard, just like with everything else. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Not really. At least not on the Continent. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

geoschmo October 2nd, 2002 08:25 PM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Quote:
Originally posted by dogscoff:
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">
Seti hit 4 MILLION Users today! That’s 4,000,000 for you guys across the pond.
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">A million is a thousand thousand, wherever you are. It's the billion that the UK and US can't agree on. In the UK we liked to think of it as a million millions, but the US Version has always been a thousand million (just to make everything look bigger http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/rolleyes.gif ).

Of course, the US Version is now becoming the standard, just like with everything else. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Are you guys joking? A billion doesn't mean a billion every where you go? What do you call a thousand million over there then?

Geoschmo

sven October 2nd, 2002 08:40 PM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
It a "milliard"

See http://www.jimloy.com/math/billion.htm for all sorts of other international number fun...

Thermodyne November 11th, 2002 09:38 PM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
I hit 10,000 units over the week end. Only 6900 and 20 more to get past.

Your credit:
Name (and URL) Thermodyne
Results Received 10075
Total CPU Time 5.397 years
Average CPU Time per work unit 4 hr 41 min 34.2 sec
Average results received per day 20.15
Last result returned: Mon Nov 11 19:35:14 2002 UTC
Registered on: Fri Jun 29 21:45:58 2001 UTC
View Registration Class
SETI@home user for: 1.370 years
View User Profile
Your group info:
You belong to the group named: Space Empires
You are not currently the founder of any teams.

Your rank: (based on current workunits received)

Your rank out of 4080972 total Users is: 6920th place.
The number of Users who have this rank: 2
You have completed more work units than 99.830% of our Users.

User Certificates
Download 10,000 Workunit Certificate
Download 7,500 Workunit Certificate
Download 5,000 Workunit Certificate
Download 2,500 Workunit Certificate
Download 1,000 Workunit Certificate
Download 750 Workunit Certificate
Download 500 Workunit Certificate
Download 250 Workunit Certificate
Download 100 Workunit Certificate

Trajan November 11th, 2002 10:12 PM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
I re-installed SETI@Home on my office machine and will add it to my old AMD 150MHZ machine, at home, which I generally never turn off.

Ragnarok November 11th, 2002 10:23 PM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Ok, I've heard about this Seti@home stuff long enough. I'm curious now. Exactly what is it and what do you do? How does it work etc...

Mudshark November 11th, 2002 10:31 PM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Ragnarok,

From the seti web site;
SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is a scientific effort seeking to determine if there is intelligent life outside Earth. SETI researchers use many methods. One popular method, radio SETI, listens for artificial radio signals coming from other stars. SETI@home is a radio SETI project that lets anyone with a computer and an Internet connection participate.

Suicide Junkie November 11th, 2002 11:28 PM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
What happens is that you download a small program, and it will run in the background while your computer is on.
It does a pretty good job of only using your idle processor time, so it will slow down or stop its work while you run some other application.

It will first download a chunk of raw data, and then grind away looking for patterns.
After roughly 10,000 Mhz-hours, it will finish, send the results back, and get another unit to work on.

If you're on a high-speed connection, you can set it to autmatically connect. If you're on dialup, it is probably best to have it wait. In that case, you will see the icon blink, and when you're connected, you can click it and press "connect now..." to send the results.

The total work done is tracked by email address, so if you have multiple machines, you can enter the smae address into the settings, and they will all count towards your ranking.

Ragnarok November 12th, 2002 12:09 AM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Oh, ok, thanks for the answers. Sounds interesting.

Kamog November 13th, 2002 08:04 AM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Has anybody found any interesting patterns in the data yet? If you're the one who processed the data that contains an alien message, will you become rich and famous?

How do they stop people from tampering with the data, adding fake Messages into the data etc?

Thermodyne November 13th, 2002 10:06 AM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
I don't think so, but you might get to go on Jay Leno's show http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Baron Munchausen November 13th, 2002 10:28 PM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Note: The original SETI@HOME projct will be ending next April (dunno exact date) after being extended several times. If you get started now you probably won't get many units done before then, and they've been having some problems anyway. But there will be new projects later in 2003, such as SETI II for the southern sky, and even some non-astronomical projects framed in the new 'generic distributed computing system' called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing).

Thermodyne November 14th, 2002 08:34 AM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Hmm..April...

Should be able to hit 20K by then http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Only 9799 to go

[ November 14, 2002, 06:35: Message edited by: Thermodyne ]

Suicide Junkie November 15th, 2002 11:51 PM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
This seti group needs to have the Webpage link updated!

Right now it ends up at a 404.
It should probably link back here to Shrapnel http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Thermodyne November 16th, 2002 12:30 AM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Quote:
Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
This seti group needs to have the Webpage link updated!

Right now it ends up at a 404.
It should probably link back here to Shrapnel http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Well if someone wants to do one up, I'm sure Paul would add the link.

Suicide Junkie November 16th, 2002 02:24 AM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
http://216.167.123.13/cgi-bin/ultima...ubb=forum;f=23

Simple as that...

Parasite April 29th, 2005 04:19 PM
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
 
Talk about rescuing an old topic http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/cool.gif I finally got a computer that I don't turn off. It is cranking away at the SETI work units. I may even pass Imperator Fyron. No way to do it in post counts. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif There are just a few of us left still processing. Let's see what these new computers can do.


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