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[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:
- The project is "at a point of diminishing returns" as it has "analyzed all the data" that is needed "for now".
- 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
(Score: 5, Funny) by DannyB on Tuesday March 03 2020, @08:08PM (13 children)
The aliens coerced the government into using invisible brain lasers to prevent us from discovering how to contain COVID-19. The aliens are shutting down SETI @ home, for the same reason, that we might discover the secret information! Their is no such thing as a tin foil hat that is too tight. I strongly recommend using two layers of aluminum foil, which more than doubles the effectiveness. This is due to a resonance effect that builds up between the two layers of foil at exactly double the frequency of the government's invisible brain lasers! You can further increase the effectiveness of your aluminum headwear by an additional 37 % if you fashion it with two antennas on top instead of one. Just FYI. But keep this information quiet!
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday March 03 2020, @08:54PM (1 child)
You can't fool us! By following your description, the tin foil hat is turned into an amplifier for brain lasers!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday March 03 2020, @09:01PM
You're not supposed to figure that out!
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.
(Score: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 03 2020, @09:01PM (4 children)
There's also the fact that SETI@Home peaked around 668 teraFLOPS in 2013 (at the cost of millions of simultaneous PCs cooking probably 50W each extra to do the calculations... guesstimate 200MW) while a single GPU like the NVIDIA V100 can exceed 14 teraFLOPS in one 300W card, so less than 20KW (and no internet bandwidth) to replace the 2013 SETI@Home compute capacity.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @09:04PM (1 child)
Does St Greta the Grumpy know about this? SETI is stealing her future!
(Score: 5, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday March 03 2020, @10:42PM
She knows how to trigger the shit out of you.
Not sure how it helps but it sure is amusing to watch.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by ewk on Wednesday March 04 2020, @10:42AM (1 child)
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.
I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 04 2020, @01:40PM
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.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @10:45PM (1 child)
"I strongly recommend using two layers of aluminum foil, which more than doubles the effectiveness."
If you do the math I suppose this is absolutely true.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 04 2020, @03:16PM
You forgot to mention the 37 percent more effective step of having two antennas.
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.
(Score: 1) by catholocism on Tuesday March 03 2020, @11:50PM (3 children)
Fun fact, if you are making a Faraday cage, tin foil will work but there's a minimal thickness requirement that means if you are using standard tin foil its gotta be layered 3 deep, 2 if its "heavy duty". This works for pouches to hold cell phones, dunno about hats.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday March 04 2020, @11:59AM (1 child)
Interesting. Is tinfoil likely to be enough against EMP weapons or accidents?
Or against a solar proton storm such as the Carrington event?
(Score: 1) by catholocism on Wednesday March 04 2020, @03:40PM
Dunno friend, only tested against wifi and 4g. Not sure that the strength is the important factor here as you are essentially just creating a mirror through which certain bands of electromagnetic phenomenon get reflected, instead of passed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @06:54PM
Depends on how thick the skull is.