Anyone on seti@home?

Splicer · Post by **Splicer** » 2003-03-13 13:23

I just signed up yesterday, I thought it was intersting.

Splicer · Post by **Splicer** » 2003-03-13 13:56

Man there was alot of mentions of seti#home today.

They must be using radio signals to control our minds.

Post by **GargoyleMT** » 2003-03-13 22:11

I was an elitist Distributed.net member. But after RC5-64 got cracked, I decided that the apathy and lack of communication on behalf of the Distributed.net team was too much for me. Plus, I realized that it was a dicksize war that really didn't matter.

It seems that SETI@Home quite a following, but it also has more mentions of problems than any other distributed processing project I've seen.

Splicer · Post by **Splicer** » 2003-03-14 02:08

Sound like fun, I run windows so I don't care what happens to it.

It just struck me as something interesting to do while I wasn't using my computer.

ivulfusbar · Post by **ivulfusbar** » 2003-03-14 02:40

i have my own problem which is getting solved when i have some cpu left. Its an optimization problem which is mixed-discrete and continuous. (One application is to optimize airplain engines).

its-easy-to-run-your-own-thing-instead-ly'ers ;))

[A&AM]Fireball · Post by **[A&AM]Fireball** » 2003-03-14 04:07

got folding@home running with my spare CPU time (http://folding.stanford.edu

Argonne · Post by **Argonne** » 2003-03-19 06:55

I too think that "folding@home" is more likely to generate useful results. There is however something quite interesting going on at seti@home. 18-20.3.2003 they are checking some 200 best candidates to see whether they really have an extraterrestial origin. It should be pretty convincing, altohugh thery could still get it wrong or it could be some unknown astronomical phenomenon.

Meanwhile the folding@home has published some of its results in "Nature", the most prestigious science journal in the world (along with "Science"). So the system really seems to work, even though it seemed a bit doubtful based on opinions from one folding expert in a recent bioinformatics conference (ISMB02). It will require quite a bit of power to generate medically useful results however (they now seem to heve about 38000 computers participating.

digitalfaction · Post by **digitalfaction** » 2003-05-19 22:49

I use to myself like my girlfriends machine.

I would like to point out a risk of running a machine thats connected to the net...

if your using up all your CPU time thats spare, you leave no for your firewall to effectively protect your machine, a hacker relys on chewing up all your clock cycles, so running something like setti@home is only going towards helping the hacker gain access to your PC, its a point I raised with them @ setti but todate I have never recieved a reply.

So you are better off using an old aged machine that you can leave running off-line from thew net.

TheParanoidOne · Post by **TheParanoidOne** » 2003-05-20 04:44

Me! I'm on SETI@Home

digitalfaction: I believe that you are wrong. In the windows version of SAH, the process runs at the "Low" priority level (visible via TaskManager on Win2k/XP).

This means that although it will use up any available CPU, it will immediately give it up if it is needed by other apps. I have it running all the time when I am using my PC. It's only an 866MHz PIII but I can watch DVDs, play Warcraft3, even run VMWare with no problems.

If I look at Task Manager, the CPU used by SAH will have gone down appropriately. Sometimes as low as 20% (usually at ~99% when no other apps running).

digitalfaction · Post by **digitalfaction** » 2003-05-21 05:15

Clock cycles are clock cycles no maytter how to dress it up or down.

Also I was Hacked which is why I dont run it anymore and it also was one of the overriding factors in my Girlfriends machine as it kept crashing, since we got rid of the software we have had no issues.

At the end of the day its your choice, IM tring to make you and others awaye that it does cause operational issues so if you have an old PC, you can donate 100% CPU time to it as an offline machine.

TheParanoidOne · Post by **TheParanoidOne** » 2003-05-21 08:25

digitalfaction wrote:Clock cycles are clock cycles no maytter how to dress it up or down.

Your original point was that the cycles should be used for the firewall and not SAH. My point was that they are. The firewall will get the cycles whether SAH is running or not.
Just as an aside that I just noticed, you seem to imply that more CPU to the firewall leads to greater security. That makes no sense to me. Care to elaborate?

At the end of the day its your choice,

Yay! Free choice!

IM tring to make you and others awaye that it does cause operational issues

I would just like to point out here that I have been using SAH for over 3 years on x86 and Sparc running Windows, Linux and Solaris without a single program crash or other problem. But of course, as with all things YMMV.

so if you have an old PC, you can donate 100% CPU time to it as an offline machine.

You seem to be missing the entire original point behind SAH. It was to use the *spare* CPU cycles of your PC when it is not in use. When you are away from your computer, it is usually not processing anything and therefore these cycles could be used productively and you are therefore using the resources of your machine efficiently.

If you are setting up a dedicated box to crunch for you, then you are actually wasting resources (unused cycles on your main machine, electricity to run the dedicated machine, etc).

Note that I am not trying to persuade you to use SAH in any way whatsoever. If you feel that you do not want it, it is your choice (as you have already mentioned). I am just giving information and my opinion.

Just out of curiosity, is it just SAH that you don't like, or all distributed number crunching projects in general?

digitalfaction · Post by **digitalfaction** » 2003-05-25 22:09

Your CPUs ability to run and process information is directly linked to clock cycles, simply more clock cycles means more data can be processed or more programs can be given time to run or protect systems & services, you slow things down enough you can get into any system because the time allotted to the firewall is reduced along with all other services that may be running give it a push with some extra work, it will stop working because the CPUs processing time is being used up removing the other programs ability to function.

So your CPUs ability to process information to maintain services and protection of your system is linked to how many redundant clock cycles you have, the fewer you leave the less secure you are or should I say the more programs and CPU time you use up the more vunerable you become.

yilard · Post by **yilard** » 2003-05-26 01:43

digitalfaction wrote: So your CPUs ability to process information to maintain services and protection of your system is linked to how many redundant clock cycles you have, the fewer you leave the less secure you are or should I say the more programs and CPU time you use up the more vunerable you become.

That's not true. You can think of firewall as a program which intercepts incomming connections and decides whether to let them pass or not (simplified). In every other aspect it is just normal program.

So if you slow it down, you can slow down creating connections, but it doesn't start skipping checks (unless there is a bug). No connections can be made without cooperation with firewall so IMO high CPU load doesn't pose increased security risk.

Paul_Don · Post by **Paul_Don** » 2003-05-26 01:52

any of u lot ran grub client at all??
www.grub.org pretty good

Sedulus · Post by **Sedulus** » 2003-05-26 04:59

"grub", bah, that's confusing man
grub is the GRand Unified Bootloader

TheParanoidOne · Post by **TheParanoidOne** » 2003-05-26 05:40

yilard wrote:So if you slow it down, you can slow down creating connections, but it doesn't start skipping checks (unless there is a bug). No connections can be made without cooperation with firewall so IMO high CPU load doesn't pose increased security risk.

Exactly! Even with digitalfaction's explanation, it still makes no sense to me because that's not how things work.

digitalfaction: If you completely consume all your CPU resources running program X, your firewall is not going to say "I can't get any cycles so I'll just let this packet/conection though". No. The packet/connection will wait until the firewall is capable of servicing it.

ender · Post by **ender** » 2003-05-26 10:49

digitalfaction wrote:Your CPUs ability to run and process information is directly linked to clock cycles, simply more clock cycles means more data can be processed or more programs can be given time to run or protect systems & services, you slow things down enough you can get into any system because the time allotted to the firewall is reduced along with all other services that may be running give it a push with some extra work, it will stop working because the CPUs processing time is being used up removing the other programs ability to function.

<sarcasm>OMG! They'll surely hack into my firewall (which also acts as p2p machine)!!! It's load average hasn't been under 3 for a few weeks now, it's always doing something (i.e., running p2p programs), it almost never has any idle cycles (not just that, it's so slow it's unusable at times), what should I do, what should I do?!</sarcasm>

DC++

Anyone on seti@home?

Anyone on seti@home?

Re: Anyone on seti@home?

seti at home