from the just-nod-if-you-can-hear-me dept.
Crypto-currency craze 'hinders search for alien life'
Scientists listening out for broadcasts by extra-terrestrials are struggling to get the computer hardware they need, thanks to the crypto-currency mining craze, a radio-astronomer has said.
Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researchers want to expand operations at two observatories. However, they have found that key computer chips are in short supply. "We'd like to use the latest GPUs [graphics processing units]... and we can't get 'em," said Dan Werthimer.
Demand for GPUs has soared recently thanks to crypto-currency mining. "That's limiting our search for extra-terrestrials, to try to answer the question, 'Are we alone? Is there anybody out there?'," Dr Werthimer told the BBC.
[...] Other radio-astronomers have been affected. A group looking for evidence of the earliest stars in the universe was recently shocked to see that the cost of the GPUs it wanted had doubled.
[...] Prof [Aaron] Parsons' radio telescope, the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionisation Array (Hera), is an American, British and South African project located in South Africa's western plains. [...] Three months ago, the Hera team had budgeted for a set of GPUs that cost around $500 (£360) - the price has since doubled to $1,000.
"We'll be able to weather it but it is coming out of our contingency budget." added Prof Parsons. "We're buying a lot of these things, it's going to end up costing about $32,000 extra."
When the inevitable flood of cheap GPUs onto the market happens, will it be a boon to science?
Related Stories
Shipments of GPUs are being slowed down or suspended in light of a slowdown in demand driven by cryptocurrency miners:
Taiwan-based graphics card makers including Gigabyte Technology, Micro-Star International (MSI) and TUL are expected to see their shipments for April plunge over 40% on month, as many clients have suspended taking shipments in response to drastic slowdown in demand for cryptocurrency mining machines, according to industry sources.
Channel distributors and larger mining farm operators have cut orders with makers of mining graphics cards and mining motherboards or asked them to suspend shipments due to the crypto mining craze waning abruptly from the beginning of April, the sources said.
Quite a few mining farm operators have even stopped purchasing graphic cards, as they are awaiting the rollout of Ethereum mining machines by China's Bitmain in the third quarter of 2018. They anticipate mining rewards to pick up gradually in the third quarter, as Bitcoin and Ethereum values may rebound following sharp declines seen in early 2018, the sources indicated.
Previously: AMD GPU Supply Exhausted By Cryptocurrency Mining, AIBs Now Directly Advertising To Miners
Cryptocoin GPU Bubble?
Ethereum Mining Craze Leads to GPU Shortages
Used GPUs Flood the Market as Ethereum's Price Crashes Below $150
Cryptocurrency Mining Wipes Out Vega 64 Stock
GPU Cryptomining Hurting SETI and Other Astronomy Projects
Related: AMD Profits in Q3 2017
New technologies, strategies expanding search for extraterrestrial life:
Emerging technologies and new strategies are opening a revitalized era in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). New discovery capabilities, along with the rapidly-expanding number of known planets orbiting stars other than the Sun, are spurring innovative approaches by both government and private organizations, according to a panel of experts speaking at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Seattle, Washington.
New approaches will not only expand upon but also go beyond the traditional SETI technique of searching for intelligently-generated radio signals, first pioneered by Frank Drake's Project Ozma in 1960. Scientists now are designing state-of-the-art techniques to detect a variety of signatures that can indicate the possibility of extraterrestrial technologies. Such "technosignatures" can range from the chemical composition of a planet's atmosphere, to laser emissions, to structures orbiting other stars, among others.
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the privately-funded SETI Institute announced an agreement to collaborate on new systems to add SETI capabilities to radio telescopes operated by NRAO. The first project will develop a system to piggyback on the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) that will provide data to a state-of-the-art technosignature search system.
"As the VLA conducts its usual scientific observations, this new system will allow for an additional and important use for the data we're already collecting," said NRAO Director Tony Beasley. "Determining whether we are alone in the Universe as technologically capable life is among the most compelling questions in science, and NRAO telescopes can play a major role in answering it," Beasley continued.
"The SETI Institute will develop and install an interface on the VLA permitting unprecedented access to the rich data stream continuously produced by the telescope as it scans the sky," said Andrew Siemion, Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute and Principal Investigator for the Breakthrough Listen Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. "This interface will allow us to conduct a powerful, wide-area SETI survey that will be vastly more complete than any previous such search," he added.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @04:53PM (4 children)
SETI and Other Astronomy Projects are irritating the cryptomining industry.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @05:55PM (3 children)
Why can't the two go together?
I'm just some dumbass AC with a superficial understanding of proof-of-work algorithms, but I'm wondering if it's not possible to create a cryptocurrency where the proof-of-work is running work units for Folding@Home for example. Of course, that necessarily implies centralized control.
Alternatively, why can't Ethereum smart contracts hand out payment for units of work (either in ETH or tokens defined by smart contracts) submitted to different projects. How much is distributed computing worth to these projects? (I know, I know, if only we could get a progressive [NOT neoliberal or whatever bad fucking joke the D team's identity politics is] government that cares about funding science, then there could be budgets for such things--use budget to buy up some ETH or whatnot and then disburse with smart contracts.)
There are some cryptocoins out there that purport to help science and mathematics. I mined some PrimeCoin [primecoin.io] many moons ago when Dogecoin was a dank meme, and when I get some more free time, I might give Einsteinium [www.emc2.foundation] a try. I understand that Primecoin has inherent value to those interested in large prime numbers, but Einsteinium seems to be marketing jazz on top of a Bitcoin clone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @06:02PM (1 child)
(Oh, forgot to check who wrote the article. It's BBC. The way to interpret this article is that it's creating a false dichotomy between cryptocurrency and science. The neoliberal policies propaganda outlets like the BBC agitate for are antiscience. Neoliberals want to defund all basic science research that won't make a profit for next quarter's balance sheets, so this article is disingenuous at best. Cryptocurrencies have the international bankers shitting themselves, so they're going to try to smear them any way they can. Just look at how Visa and Mastercard believe it's in their purview to tell us who we may and may not buy from, or even what goods and services we may or may not buy. If we pay for goods and services with Bitcoin and Ethereum, the international bankers, to paraphrase the protagonist of an 80s fantasy movie with muppets, have no power over us.)
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday February 15 2018, @07:31PM
I rarely have the stomach for the overly heated online discussions, but I'll bite: The main issue is that whatever the process is, "cryptocurrency mining", folding@home, SETI, etc, it will generally use a LOT, most, or all of your CPU time. So it's a matter of who gets that CPU / GPU time & computing power.
It would be nice (pun intended for your *nix admins) if we could control how much CPU time a process hogs, but it's not always easy. It's usually after the process has started, you have to do it manually, and many processes seem to ward off attempts to change priority. I've seen, with Windows, it doesn't matter what priority you assign a process, it can still take up all available CPU time. I'm sure someone has a tricky util. to control this, but the average home user doesn't / won't.
And the problem is that some (many) poorly designed computers, especially laptops, will overheat when run at full CPU. Even for the desktops that have good cooling and are kept clean of dust, pet hair, etc., the machine will consume significantly more watts, when running one of the aforementioned background processes, than an otherwise casual use computer.
I was running folding@home on a computer. Fan speed increased but was very reasonable, slight additional heat output, machine user interface felt normal, so it seemed okay. Trouble was- it quit working one day, I tried to reinstall but it wouldn't start up for a limited-rights user, so I uninstalled it.
But you have to wonder: maybe it was actually cryptocurrency mining, not gene folding...
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday February 16 2018, @04:33AM
Curecoin is a cryptocurrency that pays you for folding@home.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 4, Interesting) by looorg on Thursday February 15 2018, @05:06PM
I guess this explains why they have not found Satoshi Nakamoto anywhere on this earth. The cryptocurrency boom is an alien scheme to keep us from finding them via SETI.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Freeman on Thursday February 15 2018, @05:14PM (4 children)
There's a large line of annoyed computer gamers that would like the cryto-miners to take a long walk off a short pier.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @05:36PM
The cryptomillionaires are all pimple-faced gamers who used their excessive computing capacity to mine coins in the early days.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by julian on Thursday February 15 2018, @07:29PM (2 children)
It's not just gamers, it's anyone who needs a new GPU for any reason. I've been trying to get a 1070 or 1080 at original MSRP for six months and it's impossible. I'm not paying 100-200% over MSRP for a GPU. This techno tulip mania needs to end.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 16 2018, @01:34AM (1 child)
They're missing out on a boatload of profit.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by julian on Friday February 16 2018, @02:28AM
They're not though. They're literally selling them as fast as they can physically be made. To increase capacity they'd have to build more fabs, which is slow and expensive. There's no guarantee that the mining craze will still be around when those new fabs are up and running. They could end up with a massive capital investment for a market that no longer exists. It's too risky to take that chance, or at least that's the current common wisdom in the industry. There are not that many chip makers, either. AMD doesn't make any of their own silicon, they're at the mercy of TSMC which have their own priorities and business plans.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday February 15 2018, @05:28PM (10 children)
SETI is a total waste of CPU power, games are a pleasant way to waste time, and cryptocurrencies are a very wasteful way to maybe make money...
If only there was a way those GPUs could directly contribute to the advancement of science [stanford.edu].
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday February 15 2018, @06:03PM (7 children)
Maybe Stanford should be looking for ways to reward folders with cryptocurrencies for all the resources they burn folding.
I've had to temporarily suspend my folding machine due to bulging capacitors. That after heating my home office with via folding for months on end,
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Thursday February 15 2018, @06:23PM
Don't be silly. How could Stanford afford to reward the people providing it with free computing power without having to raise student fees?
They only have a paltry 22.4 Billion dollars in the bank ...
(Score: 3, Funny) by RS3 on Thursday February 15 2018, @07:38PM (4 children)
I've heard caps will accumulate genes that got folded too many times. You have to drill holes and let them out before they explode and spray genetic goo.
But seriously, did that really happen? I've changed a lot of caps over the years. You're pretty sure it was CPU load causing cap problems?
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Thursday February 15 2018, @10:22PM
Is that what the kids are calling it nowadays?
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Friday February 16 2018, @03:17AM (2 children)
My guess is the heat, as electrolytic capacitors don't like to get hot. With that said, if the caps started bulging because of the heat, the computer was not properly cooled to begin with (even if it wasn't crashing).
Either that or it's a 10-15 year old PC basically being used as a resistive heater. :)
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday February 16 2018, @03:29AM
shutdown of your space heater?
I Am Ansolutely Serious
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday February 16 2018, @07:23AM
Yes, heat is usually the enemy of electronic components. Electrolytic caps actually have a liquid electrolyte in them.
I'm not sure if everyone knows the story of bad caps https://www.badcaps.net/index.php [badcaps.net] or "capacitor plague" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague [wikipedia.org] as some call it.
In power supplies, capacitors are used to store charge and are called "filter capacitors" because they sort of filter out the "ripple" you get from rectified AC. (Rectified means AC turned into DC, usually by way of diodes, which used to be called "rectifiers".) Older power supply capacitors only had to withstand the "ripple current", electric current moving in and out of the cap, at 50 or 60 Hz ("half-wave"), or 100 or 120 Hz (full-wave), depending on your country. AC "mains" or "line" voltage, usually transformed to a lower or higher voltage depending on circuit needs, then rectified. Now with switching supplies the caps work very hard- switching frequencies are usually 50-200 KHz, so much much more work for the caps to do.
An ideal cap would be okay at any frequency, but actual caps have some internal resistance, and electric current through resistance results in heat. Add to that a chemical action that takes place with all of that ripple current, on top of a faulty capacitor chemistry, used in underdesigned circuits, and you get rapid failures. They don't always bulge or burst, but the bulging is actually a good thing because it lets you know the caps are bad for sure.
Motherboards have switching supplies on them to derive the various lower voltages needed by CPU, RAM, etc., thus caps to go bad.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday February 16 2018, @04:36AM
Curecoin.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @07:35PM (1 child)
Unfortunately, "advancement of science" is not a compelling enough reason to use proprietary software like folding@home.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @09:21PM
If Folding@home wants to use my CPU/GPU, they can pay me, otherwise they can do their own work and waste their own resources.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Inspired on Thursday February 15 2018, @05:34PM (1 child)
"Prof [Aaron] Parsons' radio telescope, the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionisation Array (Hera), is an American, British and South African project located in South Africa's western plains. "
Dr. Evil: The key to this project is the giant radio telescope which was invented by the noted Berkeley astrophysicist, Professor Parsons. So therefore, it is fitting to call it: "The Aaron Parsons Project".
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday February 16 2018, @05:16PM
With an eye in the sky? Or maybe it should be "an eye to the sky" to avoid copyright infringement?
(for those who don't get the reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_in_the_Sky_(song) [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @05:54PM
i mean come on. boinc and seti and the other projects that use GPUs to calculate stuff -- people are donating time to them. This sounds more like they are crying that people are wasting their electricity in a different way, one that actually might pay for itself back.
i've donated time to the various boinc projects; I don't expect to get a discount or even afford any life saving anything that they find, or even get to ride the alien space ship if my computer helped find it.
they're in no position to look in the gift horse's mouth and complain about what they find. granted the projects themselves require funding, but it is working with stuff they have at the moment. they could spend their resources on means to improve such ends rather than cry about the video card processing they aren't getting.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @06:17PM (3 children)
"When the inevitable flood of cheap GPUs onto the market happens" oh please do stfu.
Instead of gamers and scientists (who evidently just crawled out from under a rock) whining about the cryptocurrency "craze" stealing all "their" GPUs why don't they demand these retarded ass GPU companies do their job and supply GPUs? If everyone would scream at AMD, and those disgusting @#$% at nvidia, maybe they would up their #@%$^ production. Prices and availability have been screwed for months or for a whole year if you don't count the month or so these morons actually restocked. how long does it take before it's not $enemy_tribe's fault? Their job is to supply the demand. That means you increase production until people aren't buying all of them up immediately! Sick of their assinine excuses about how cryptocurrency is just a "craze". It doesn't matter where they are going. If you can't react to changes in demand in a half way reasonable fashion you are just stupid and useless. We will replace your whole antiquated, joke of a distribution system with p2p blockchain solutions. We will replace your silo'd slaveware manufacturing with distributed, open hardware manufacturing. Though, that will take longer. I suggest you make the money while you can.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday February 15 2018, @06:20PM
HODL HODL HODL
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday February 15 2018, @06:29PM
> Their job is to supply the demand.
Their first job is to remain solvent.
If/When the crypto craze stops, the market will be flooded with second-hand GPUs. If they matched current demand, they would end up with production overcapacity, and dramatically shrunk demand, which is a recipe for disaster.
Some people have learnt from the 2001 crisis (they also don't finance their own customers, which was the third nail in many companies' coffins then).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by unauthorized on Thursday February 15 2018, @11:17PM
Ramping up production to satisfy the demand in a glorified pyramid scheme is a poor long-term strategy.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 15 2018, @06:28PM (6 children)
I'm all for detecting aliens, but SETI just seems to be a massive waste of time and resources to me. The whole thing is predicated on a huge assumption: that the aliens are intentionally beaming extremely strong, repeating radio signals into space so that we'll find them. However, *we* don't do this ourselves. So why should we expect other civilizations to do this? If aliens tried to detect us the way SETI does, they wouldn't find us: we use low-power radio for our communcations that's not detectable outside the solar system, and we don't generate signals that intentionally repeat, so anything they did see would look like noise. Maybe they'd get lucky and detect our transmissions to our handful of space probes, but that's about it. Plus, what makes us so sure aliens use radio anyway? They could very well use photonic technologies for space-based communications, or worse, something we've only dreamed of, such as neutrinos. It doesn't help that our antennas are all Earth-based, and subject to all kinds of radio noise from that. Maybe we could do better if we had some real space capability, and built antenna satellites which orbited in the outer system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @07:23PM
There are no aliens.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday February 15 2018, @07:24PM
Photonic communications (lasers) could also be detected from afar, although that hardly detracts from your argument.
"Optical SETI" is where it's at. So long as the JWST and a successor or two launch without a hitch.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Thursday February 15 2018, @07:29PM
you are not sure you are the mightiest civilization around? then DO NOT advertise your position.
you are sure you are? then why advertise your position? go visit the peasants on weekends.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @07:50PM
maybe you could go through a couple of physics books before you start talking about this.
1. the frequencies SETI is looking at are the frequencies that we would use if we wanted to talk to people living around other stars. they are the frequencies for which most of the universe is transparent, while at the same time they are cheap to produce.
2. "photonic technologies"? grow up. any radio technology is, by construction, "photonic technology".
3. "we don't generate signals that intentionally repeat". go read the SETI website. they routinely detect human generated signals and classify them as "communication". they then figure out it's human because they know where satellites are etc.
4. neutrinos. again: grow up. neutrinos are hard to generate, and hard to detect. let's ignore that for now, and just talk about signal to noise ratios. supernovas are the only source of neutrinos that we can clearly detect with neutrino detectors. otherwise whatever neutrinos we do detect (one per month or something) are of unknown origin, i.e. noise. in fact, the universe is filled with neutrinos travelling in all possible directions at many different speeds, because neutrinos don't generally interact with anything. so, you will need to put in an enormous amount of energy when generating your neutrino signal, because the noise level is gigantic.
in more simple terms: go to a rock concert, and try to talk to your friend from 10 m away. that's probably easier to do than try to talk across star systems with neutrinos.
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Thursday February 15 2018, @11:55PM (1 child)
Incorrect. SETI is not listening just for information radio signals, they are looking for distinctive radio patterns that suggest engineered origin. Many high energy processes emit all across the spectrum as a byproduct and can easily be detected by a project like SETI.
We are a mere K0.6-K0.8 civilization and the energy we have available is tiny. To a hypothetical K2 civilization, the total artificial energy our civilization uses 0.000000000004% of their energy budget. Such a civilization could afford energetic processes that we could't even begin to dream of - mass production of antimatter, engineering artificial blackholes, accelerating planetoid-sized objects to appreciable fractions of c, building Dyson spheres and even star lifting.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday February 16 2018, @05:08AM
Such a civilization could afford energetic processes that we could't even begin to dream of - mass production of antimatter, engineering artificial blackholes, accelerating planetoid-sized objects to appreciable fractions of c, building Dyson spheres and even star lifting.
And how many of these processes are going to create signals we can detect?
More importantly, why do we expect to find K2 civilizations? K1 and ~K0.5 ones like ours are probably much more common, and perhaps there's little real incentive for a civilization to try to build the technology necessary to harness an entire star's energy, rather than just living in artificial reality. Assuming there's a bunch of K2 civilizations out there, which is really almost godlike to us, and not even something most of our sci-fi speculates on, seems like a pretty silly thing to assume and base an entire research program on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @08:24PM (1 child)
I've recently been wanting to build a new box, but ram and gpu prices are insane! Most estimates on RAM prices give a year or so for manufacturers to get new production up to the point that prices drop, but for gpu there is no end in sight.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 16 2018, @04:00PM
i had a 1600 watt power supply fail. i used 1200 of those watts with some room to spare..
but getting a replacement of a similar size at a normal price was not possible. i dont have a shipping date or even an eta... but i got one on backorder. right now i am using two older psus from computer builds of christmases past... (and really based on the purchase dates, they were on sale around that time of year when I bought them...)
i had to buy an adapter cable to combine the signal and ground wires to let them both turn on at the same time because i didnt want to use a paperclip. now the ads i get often include coin mining accessories... so add psus to your list of hardware eaten up by the tulip craze.