Beam me up, Scotty. Nothing found.

SETI takes timeout at 21 (half of 42!)

[iamlost]

Once upon a long time ago (1999) I joined a distributed personal computer network (Seti @home [setiathome.berkeley.edu]) that used spare computer cycles to Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)

Sadly, that program will go into abeyance as of 31-March-2020.
Without finding an intelligence, extraterrestrial or other.

SETI@home hibernation

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.

While SETI is reasonably well known to the public there are other scientific investigations [boinc.berkeley.edu] using the same volunteer computing methodology.

Over the years replaced development servers were repurposed for:
Asteroids @home [asteroidsathome.net]
...to derive shapes and spin for a significant part of the asteroid population.

Climate Prediction @home [cpdn.org]
Investigate the approximations that have to be made in state-of-the-art climate models.

MilkyWay @home [milkyway.cs.rpi.edu]
...create a highly accurate three dimensional model of the Milky Way galaxy

Rosetta @home [boinc.bakerlab.org]
...design new proteins and to predict their 3-dimensional shapes

Since the release of SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences in late January, a number of important corona virus proteins ... have been modeled on R@h volunteer computers.

There are many ways to be of assistance to others. Some bandwidth, electricity, and otherwise discarded computers... a no brainer.

[lammert]

Ahh... Reminds me of the time my Playstation 3 was humming away each night folding proteins at Folding@home. I might join again now because of the coronavirus.

[tangor]

Reminds me of an episode of JAG wherein the chief JAG was paternally forgiving when a Rate put it on his computer.

Yes, it is about time they actually analyze and report on what all those computer cycles actually found!

[creeking]

the whole thing was a college psych experiment in herd behavior

[Dimitri]

I had installed Seti @home when it was new, I think the idea was (and is still) great.

[iamlost]

Apparently quite a number of folks have followed through on lammert’s ‘might join’ folding@home:


* @drGregBowman [mobile.twitter.com], Folding@Home director, 20-March-2020.

Amazing!
@foldingathome now has over 470 petaFLOPS of compute power

That equates to 470 thousand trillion (yes, thousand trillion) calculations per second.
Wheee! :)