SETI & Crunching news

As promised, we've stopped the process that puts new data into the queue today. Data distribution will continue until the files shown on the status pages are done. We'll be accepting results and resending results that didn't validate for a while.

We are saddened to report that former moderator and long-term friend of SETI@home Jim Scott passed away unexpectedly this morning. Angela has started a thread where people can post their memories of Jim and offer condolences.

SETI@home will stop distributing tasks soon, but we encourage you to continue donate computing power to science research - in particular, research on the COVID-19 virus. The best way to do this is to join Science United and check the "Biology and Medicine" box.

Richard Lawn has posted a new SETI Perspective entitled How did life begin on Earth and elsewhere?.

If we don't find ET, our secondary goal is to quantify the sensitivity of the search. Read about
some ideas about how we can do this in the Nebula blog.

On March 31, the volunteer computing part of SETI@home will stop distributing work and will go into hibernation.

We're doing this for two reasons:

1) Scientifically, we're at the point of diminishing returns; basically, we've analyzed all the data we need for now.

2) It's a lot of work for us to manage the distributed processing of data. We need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results we already have, and writing this up in a scientific journal paper.

However, SETI@home is not disappearing. The web site and the message boards will continue to operate. We hope that other UC Berkeley astronomers will find uses for the huge computing capabilities of SETI@home for SETI or related areas like cosmology and pulsar research. If this happens, SETI@home will start distributing work again. We'll keep you posted about this.

If you're currently running SETI@home on your computer, we encourage you to attach to other BOINC-based projects as well. Or use Science United and sign up to do astronomy. You can stay attached to SETI@home, of course, but you won't get any jobs until we find new applications.

We're extremely grateful to all of our volunteers for supporting us in many ways during the past 20 years. Without you there would be no SETI@home. We're excited to finish up our original science project, and we look forward to what comes next.

For a couple of reasons, the result table has grown to the point where it no longer fits in main memory. That has been slowing the validators and assimilators, which is causing the result table to grow further.

We'd like to get it down to a manageable size before our Tuesday outage. To that end we are throttling work generation to a rate at which the table size is shrinking. We hope that this rate will increase as the table gets smaller.

So for the next few days work will be hard to come by (but not zero).

Check out Stars in Their Eyes?, a research paper from the University of Geneva about why people run SETI@home.

Mr. Kevvy and the GPU Users Group have graciously convened a fundraiser to help modernize our aging storage infrastructure. Thank you Mr. Kevvy and GPUUG!

It's the Friday before a holiday week and the servers know it.

The file system containing the beta project uploads directory is having problems, so beta is down until further notice.

This problem may be affecting the rate at which the main project can handle results, so the validation and assimilation queues are getting large, which may affect the rate of work generation.