SETI & Crunching news

Happy Anniversary! On this date in 1999, SETI@home came online. Since then millions of our volunteers have helped us sift through petabytes of data from multiple radio telescopes. ET still hasn't shown up to the party.

We're not discouraged. We're able to examine less than a tenth of a percent of the radio spectrum, over only 1/3 of the sky and a limited number of additional stars. But our capabilities are increasing every day. In 1999 it took up to a week to process a single workunit on a home PC. Now, on a machine with a GPU, it might only take a few minutes to do a far more detailed and more sensitive analysis. Who knows what the next 20 years will bring?

Richard Lawn has written a new article, this one on the Panoramic Optical SETI effort, PANOSETI. As a bonus he includes a bit of an update on 'Oumuamua.

An update on the SETI@home back-end data analysis is here.

We had to recover the master database on oscar from a backup taken today on carolyn. Oscar is now back to being the master DB and carolyn is once again the replica DB. Things will be a bit slow as the database becomes resident in memory.

Richard Lawn has given us a new SETI Perspectives article to think about. This one is about the Drake Equation.

This time the primary database machine crashed and hasn't automatically recovered. We've fallen back to the replica machine, and the only symptom should be a few extra hours of outage.

I'm glad we have the replica.

Richard M Lawn has posted another interesting article to the SETI Perspectives forum. This one is about the mysteries of Fast Radio Burst (aka FRBs), possibly some of the most distant explosions ever seen.

Hopefully there won't be any further problem.

Our attempt to upgrade the memory on Oscar (the BOINC database machine) and Carolyn (the replica database) took a bit of DIMM swapping to find pairs of DIMMs that worked. Carolyn is still short two DIMMs (32 GB), but we didn't want to extend the outage any further to try to get it up to the full 192 GB.

We might try to max out Carolyn during the outage next week.

[edit]And as is usual after a long outage, we've got a large number of hosts out there starving for work. It'll take a little while before "no work" messages start to get less frequent.[/edit]

We had a problem with one of our download servers that was slowing down downloads and slowing down work generation. We've fixed the problem, but there are lots of people out there trying to download. It'll probably be a while before our downloads aren't swamped with requests.

Work ready to send has started trending back up, so we shouldn't end up with a work shortage.

We have added a new forum called SETI Perspectives that will showcase thoughts on SETI and related topics from people not directly connected with the Berkeley SETI group. Richard Lawn, Ph.D is our first contributor with an article about 'Oumuamua, the first object we've seen that convincingly originates from outside from outside the solar system. We hope have a long collaboration with Richard. Please welcome him into the SETI@home family.

I'm sad to report that we've lost another long time SETI@home volunteer and moderator Gordon MacKenzie Lowe. A remembrance thread has been started here.

Gordon will be greatly missed.

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) system is the software infrastructure used by Einstein@Home and many other volunteer distributed computing projects. The BOINC Open Source Project is looking for volunteers to develop and maintain the BOINC client on macOS. The BOINC Client and Manager are C++ cross-platform code supporting Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, and several other operating systems. We currently have a number of volunteer developers supporting Windows and Linux, but our main macOS developer is winding down his involvement after many years. He is prepared to help a few new macOS developers get up to speed.

If you have macOS development experience and are interested in volunteering time to help support and maintain the BOINC macOS client please have a look at the more detailed description here: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/MacDeveloper

If you want to help, please sign up to the BOINC Developer email list here: ​https://groups.google.com/a/ssl.berkeley.edu/forum/#!forum/boinc_dev.

If you are not a macOS developer, but have other skills and are interested in contributing to BOINC, the link above also has more general information.

Thank you!

A machine that was holding 15% of our outgoing workunits has crashed and refuses to start back up. Short term it means that attempts to access those workunits will cause an error until the workunit is marked as bad.

Sorry for the incovenience.

GeorgeM, the machine that holds the data that you download, decided that it was time to verify that the RAID array is in good shape. That will slow down disk access until the verify procedure is complete. The main effect is slowing down the rate at which work can be created. It's likely that we'll run out of work in the next hour or so. Things should recover automatically when it's done.