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posted by janrinok on Tuesday March 03 2020, @07:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-many-green-men-have-we-found? dept.

[Editor's note: We have been unable to corroborate this story from GHacks. A search on Google has found there are other reports of this, but they all refer to a forum that no longer corroborates this report. It seems there was — something — but that it is not now visible on their site. See, too, the "Previously" section at the bottom which suggests this story may be in error. Can any Soylentil shed some light on this? --martyb]

SETI@Home's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence comes to an end - gHacks Tech News:

SETI@Home will go into hibernation on March 31, 2020. The distributed computing project was launched in 1999 to analyze data provided by the radio telescope Arecibo in Puerto Rico. Later on, data from the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and Parkes Observatory in Australia were added.

SETI@Home -- SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence -- broke down the signals into packets which it then distributed to connected computer systems. These computer systems, often operated by volunteers from around the world, would then be used to analyze the data and transfer results back to the project.

[...] The project maintainers at UC Berkeley provide two reasons for the decision:

  1. The project is "at a point of diminishing returns" as it has "analyzed all the data" that is needed "for now".
  2. Managing the distributed processing of data is a lot of work and time is required to complete the "back-end analysis of the results" that have been obtained already.

Hibernation means that the project is not disappearing from the face of the earth. The project website and forums remain open and the distributed computing resources of SETI@Home may be used by other scientific research projects to focus on areas such as "cosmology or pulsar research". Seti@Home may start distributing work again if that happens and the project team will make an announcement if a new research project has been found.

Previously:
New Technologies, Strategies Expanding Search for Extraterrestrial Life


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  • (Score: 3, Disagree) by ewk on Wednesday March 04 2020, @10:42AM (1 child)

    by ewk (5923) on Wednesday March 04 2020, @10:42AM (#966422)

    While we currently might squeeze the amount of 2013 distributed teraFLOPS into one 19"-rack, I doubt if we manage to do the same with the 2013 distributed memory-bandwidth needed for these computations.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 04 2020, @01:40PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday March 04 2020, @01:40PM (#966451)

    Aaaaahhhh... too lazy to do the math at this hour, but the memory bandwidth of a single V100 card is seriously impressive as compared to, say, 100 2013 era home PCs. Certainly a well architected SETI@Home replacement system would take more than just grabbing the easiest to find high performance components off of Newegg and slapping them in a rack, but... for the cost of administering SETI@Home for a year (say: one FTE), you could almost surely design/spec and buy the hardware required to replace the 2013 compute capacity - and whatever size it ends up being, three orders of magnitude lower power consumption seems well within reach.

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