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."

What about emergency situations?

[UR30]

Can BOINC give cpu resources in emergency situations to, e.g., computing the effects of a nuclear disaster, or an earthquake? This would greatly help in recovering from catastrophes.

Foldit

[gcnaddict]

I still think we're better off folding@home [stanford.edu] than hunting afar

Re:about time...

[AuMatar]

SETI is a data processing project. You need enough people to process all your data (with some redundancy, to make sure noone lies). Anything over that is wasted- they don't need it, and in fact are giving them busy work. They reached that point several years ago. With this move, instead of giving them busy work, they can give them work on other scientific projects.

They are buffoons

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I have looked into this a couple of months ago -- and ran away screaming at all I had to do to migrate to BIONIC.

I've got the Seti current client. I should just have a button to push. I shouldn't have to re-create accounts and step through all kinds of crap that only a programmer would love, or think up and would embarass the hell out any programmer with GUI/HMI training in the 21st century. [amazon.com]

Yes, I know they're largely a volunteer organization. And that affects my observation just how? If they wanna have lots of people, they've gotta move some ass to make it more user friendly to switch. I care not that the underlying mechanism of distributed computing is changing.

Re:Lose members

[valisk]

Truthfully I doubt that they will lose members.
And I dont think the transition is a problem, you simply create an account on the new Seti@home site [berkeley.edu] and link it to your old one so that your credit is transferred over, Then download Boinc and insert your project and ID code and it does the rest.
I switched over to Boinc in March or April and since then have had no problems at all. old Seti credit is transported across when you sign into the Boinc account version of Seti, and you can compile and run optimized clients for your architecture, something the old seti never really had.
I got a 35% performance increase by switching to an optimized client.

Boinc itself isn't really a replacement for seti though, it is simply a manager
You choose which projects you wish to subscribe to, and how long you want any particular project to hog resources for and away you go.
At first i ran seti alone, but recently I have been running the Einstein@home [uwm.edu] and LHC@Home [lhcathome.cern.ch] client on a 33% resource share basis with Seti.
Einstein, looks for spinning Pulsars and the LHC is a client from CERN running simulations of particles spinning around the new Six Track large hadron colider.
The LHC project has just finished sadly, but I think I'll move onto the Rosetta project [bakerlab.org], which is looking to work out various protein structures and interactions and how they can be used.

If, like me, you always fancied running a few other projects other than Seti but didnt want the hassle of manually deciding which client ot run then Boinc is a real boon and well worth the few minutes needed to set it up.

Have a go, I think you will like it!

Re:What about emergency situations?

[AuMatar]

Umm, if the disaster has already happened, you don't need to model the results- just step outside. There's nothing a computer can do to help here.

Re:Lose members

[MasterDirk]

Truthfully I do think that they will lose members. They can either:

1. Create a new account on the new site (active involvement)
2. Link new account to old account (involves remembering things)
3. Download Boinc (go out and get something new)
4. Insert project ID code (new stuff, not previously needed)

or they can

1. Do nothing, everything is configured already and working by itself giving warm fozzy feeling

I know I'm not going to bother. It's not important enough to me, although I thought it was kind of cool when I started my Seti@home account. I have since lost interest (having about a 30-minute attention-span), and been happily churning data since.

Re:BOINC blows

[braindead]

Go back to BOINC, attach to project using account key that was e-mailed to you (or e-mail address.)

Yes, except that cut/paste doesn't work on he Linux client. Oh, and you have to use the numbers on the keys above the letters, because the numeric pad doesn't work.

The grandparent post was being generous when it said that the client has numerous usability problems. I would say that if their other clients are as bad as the linux one, I expect they'll get no user whatsoever. When I'm donating cycles, I'm not going to be willing to spend much effort to install the software at all. Every extra step means they get fewer users.