SETI@home Becomes Part of BOINC

Sudoku writes "On December 15th the Seti@home project will stop issuing new work to members and integrate with BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. Once members have moved over to the BOINC client they can divide their computing time between such projects as climate prediction, search for gravitational signals emitted by pulsars and yes, you can still look for the aliens."

Article inaccurately titled.

[justinarthur]

SETI@Home joined the BOINC project long ago, at least a year ago. There has also been an account migration service since the beginning of the BOINC integration. The only news here is that they are discontinuing support for the old SETI@Home client.

Re:BOINC blows

[Epi-man]

I have managed to waste a couple hours fighting with that pile of dreck. I had it working for a while, then had to reboot, no idea why it can't see the internet (again) now. Not a stellar example of open source software...

Re:Odds of finding aliens

[hcob$]

But, maybe my math is off on this, but 1 is infinately larger than 0.... no matter what exponent you use ;)

Re:BOINC could be a lot more efficient

[goofy183]

I think the parent addressed this in their post.

These data are sent to the distributed server which determines the optimal allocation of work between all clients, while guaranteeing each client that as much or more work will be done on the project of their choice as would occur if that client worked solely on its preferred project.

The idea is if I want to dedicate my computer to SETI. And my computer can do 10 units/hr, my involvement in the BOINC network ensures that at least 10 more units/hr of SETI are being done. The actual work may be done by someone else's CPU which is better suited to SETI and my PC may be doing RC5 but the effect of me joining and saying I want to be 100% on SETI is at least the same, if not better.

Re:Lose members

[Xzzy]

> BOINC isn't trivial, but it's not hard either.

I honestly don't see how they're going to attact anyone except nerds to run their software.

It's crap, the documentation is crap, and you can really only figure it out through trial and error. The main BOINC page has a "software" section, but no link to actually download the clients. Instead, they elected to stash the client download link below the list of available projects. So you sort that out, get the client, and run it.

I don't know what it's like for the other projects, but their dumb little wizard for signing onto a project doesn't work at all with seti@home. It says to enter an URL, without clearly explaining that the URL is merely the homepage of the project. So I just guessed by cutting and pasting off the BOINC home page and happened to get it right. Well, so one would think. It never gave positive confirmation. Then it takes you to this little login screen, and I immediatley tried to log in with my old seti@home account. The software thinks about that for a minute, then presents you with a generic communication error and no clue on what to do next. So I tried to make a new account.. same generic error. I only discovered you have to go to the seti@home page and "migrate" your account to the new system by going to the seti@home webpage, looking for some hint on how to proceed. Few minutes later, after filling out a number of forms and getting a "key" in my email, I pasted it into the BOINC wizard and was finally able to attach to the project.

Again, not one single bit of this is documented in a clear format. Only random trial and error figured it out. Even their "help" page is little more than a high brow explanation of the software and the mechanics of how the system functions. Like I said, only nerds are going to take the time to figure this thing out.

At least the old seti@home was as simple as double clicking a file and entering an email address, something easily graspable by your average schmoe.

Re:BOINC blows

[Eravnrekaree]

I thought the BOINC client was a useability disaster when I tried it. It had numerous technical problems and was very unintiutive. While some may say that people should how to work with its unnecessarily involved configuration, I think this is is an arrogant assumption, especially for people who are DONATING their computers resources, if it isnt easy to install and provide some good graphics to show what it is doing, people will not bother and will give up, and the project will use a lot of users. The reason seti@home was such a success, was due to the fact it didnt require much user configuration to run (but was still configurable) and provide a nice graphics display to show that it was doing something. With BOINC the graphics display seemed to be difficult to access, and the whole thing seemed to involve a lot of configuration to use. I think the seti@home project will lose a large number of users from this.

Re:Foldit

[jmt9581]

While I agree that folding@home is more useful than seti@home, I think that Rosetta@home [bakerlab.org]. It's also focused on protein folding, but the difference is that Rosetta has consistently outperformed folding@home at the CASP (Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction) competitions. Check out the CASP website [predictioncenter.org] to see the raw results. Or, check out a summary from the Baker Lab website [washington.edu]. Also, Dr. David Baker (head of the lab where Rosetta has been developed) is very involved in the community of users that run Rosetta@home, check the messageboards on the Rosetta@home [bakerlab.org] site.

Disclaimer: I'm a student in David's lab. But that doesn't mean that I'm wrong, or mindlessly plugging my own Kool-Aid. :) I really believe that Dr. Baker and his lab have a strong chance to solve the protein folding prediction problem.

Whatever project you choose to donate your cycles to in the end, protein science is a cool field with far-reaching implications for humans in general, and the scientists in the field really appreciate your cycles. Thanks to all those who are donating and will donate in the future.

Re:BOINC blows

[Liquidrage]

What part is complicated?

For me, it's the getting it to run part. It doesn't give me enough information to make troubleshooting worth it.
Create projcet account and enter project URL they say? Ah, yes. But apparently there's some proxy issue since after doing so I get the "proxy configuration" screen. Well, isn't that interesting. Username, password, server and port for HHTP and SOCKS. Hmmm!
Gee, I wonder what I should put in there. I don't have anything to put in there. Apparently I'm the only idiot in the world that gets this screen and can't get past this. There's no reason I can think of that would have me get this. But alas, that is what it does.

I'm sure if I want to waste a few more hours with it I'll eventually get it. But this is just crap.

Re:BOINC blows

[jim_deane]

Another issue is that BOINC requires fairly modern hardware. I kept some older computers around specifically to crunch Seti@Home packets for a long time, including an overdriven 486 DX/2-66 (nee 5x86/133).

Now, crap, even my daily desktop (built in early 2002) is hardly up to the task. Considering that I started crunching packets in 1999, I'd really [i]like[/i] to continue, but I'm not going to buy hardware just to keep up with Seti@Bloat.

Jim

yup your math is indeed wrong.

[zippthorne]

1-0 = 1 not infinity.

while it's true that lim(x->infinity) 1/x = 0 the converse, lim(x->infinity) 0*x = 1 cannot also be said to be true.

lim(a->infinity) (1-0)/a = 0

Re:Great, no OpenVMS or Alpha NT versions

[SETIGuy]

Someone may yet port to these platforms, but unfortunately, we can't afford the time and effort required.

For SETI@home, OpenVMS was responsible for less that 0.2% of the results returned. Non-intel Windows generated about 0.06%. That means if I worked non-stop on porting, 8 hours a day, 47 weeks a year, I should probably allocate about 3 hours and 45 minutes anually towards a VMS port, and 1 hour and 8 minutes toward a Alpha/Windows port. I don't think I could accomplish either in that amount of time. Think of it as economics in action.

Unfortunately, I only work about 25% time on SETI@home coding, if that, so divide those numbers by at least four.

It's likely that someone will eventually do these ports. A lot of ports are available here [berkeley.edu]. Just not VMS or AlphaNT yet. Of course, an unsupported binary is more difficult to install.

Sorry, but that's just the way reality works.

Re:SETI@Home has been using BOINC for a while

[SETIGuy]

In operation BOINC works fairly well but on Windows XP it kills performance in some apps.

I get that too. It's really the Windows scheduler that's the problem. There's insufficient dynamic range between normal and idle priority. For that reason, on windows machines I usually have them set up to run only when the user is inactive.

Re:Same problem here--anybody have a fix?

[Sunlighter]

The servers are congested right now. Apparently BOINC has a really short timeout. Just wait a few hours and try again.

I tried it at around 7 PM CST, and it prompted me for a proxy server. I tried it again at 11:30 PM CST and it worked.

Re:Same problem here--anybody have a fix?

[Chuck Chunder]

I just installed it this morning and when that happened to me it seemed to be that the manager hadn't connected to the client properly.

I quit the manager and then restarted it from the start menu and then I could add projects without much fuss.