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Gargamel

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@Zeiss Ikon, I was driving home the other day, and I got to thinking, with the recent LIGO discoveries, is it still worth my processor time to be running Einstein@home?  Saw in another thread you also run this one. 

I run SETI@home, and a couple others, plus some number crunching programs I've written that run in the back ground for the past few years, so if E@H is no longer really relevant, I'd like to use my time for something else.  

For those that don't know, BOINC is basically a screensaver program that crunches numbers for a variety of scientific research projects, using distributed computing power.   Their 'flagship' program is/was SETI@home, where you process radio signals received from Aricebo, and look for little green men in the data.   They have a number of different programs you can choose from, similar to Zooniverse, but BOINC only runs when you are not using your computer, when it would normally be sitting idle, and automatically, it doesn't require user interaction aside from setting it up. 

 

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My opinion: most of what Einstein@Home is searching for, LIGO will never see.  They're mapping things like new discoveries of neutron stars and binary neutron stars; LIGO apparently can only detect merging black holes.  Very different things.

Where Einstein might find gravity waves (if it ever does) is in short-term changes in period of binary neutron stars (potentially with sub-one-second orbits, detectable by watching the Doppler shift of emitted radiation).

I don't have other needs to soak up my CPU cycles.  I gave up SETI some years ago, before BOINC provided a common control for these distributed computing tasks.  MilkyWay, however, I feel produces more usable results than SETI (especially with recent reexaminations of the Drake equation suggesting we might well be the only advanced civilization in the Milky Way at this time) -- presuming the Drake factors like "average life of a civilization" don't get us, we'll be using that information for the rest of time.  Even if we never leave our own solar system, we'll use the information on which stars belong to what populations (i.e. originated from which merged dwarf galaxy or full size galaxy, leading to where they're headed and how fast) to inform astronomy and cosmology for as long as we keep looking at the stars with a scientific eye.  If we once become starfarers, we'll need to know that information whether we take a million years to cross the galaxy, or do it in a single lifetime (after inventing a workable warp drive).

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8 hours ago, Zeiss Ikon said:

LIGO apparently can only detect merging black holes.

They picked up a neutron merger a few months ago IIRC.

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/press-release-gw170817

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

These kind of don't apply here Kerb, as we're talking home PC's, and not super computing.  While, yes they do apply to PC's, but with BOINC, you can usually on run one program at a time.   So if I have 4-5 programs installed, my PC will cycle through them one at a time, and only when the screen saver is running.  If one of these programs is obsolete, in this case Einstein@Home, then I'd rather drop that one and pick up another to crunch numbers.    So it's not a matter of how much data can I process, but which data do I process?

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8 minutes ago, Gargamel said:

These kind of don't apply here Kerb, as we're talking home PC's, and not super computing.  While, yes they do apply to PC's, but with BOINC, you can usually on run one program at a time.   So if I have 4-5 programs installed, my PC will cycle through them one at a time, and only when the screen saver is running.  If one of these programs is obsolete, in this case Einstein@Home, then I'd rather drop that one and pick up another to crunch numbers.    So it's not a matter of how much data can I process, but which data do I process?

I mean, once I was thinking about installing such software on my home computer.
It's anyway on 24/7, so why not let the humanity use it 2/3 of time when I was not actively using it.

But then I realized that I will be paying for energy it additionally consumes, buying new parts because they will be working 24/7 at full load, just to let some much richer organization save its money, and all that to produce results which will be easily achieved 10 years later when they buy a new computer.

Say, 20 years ago I had 486DX iirc 66 MHz.
Currently I have i5 3300 MHz.
I.e. 50 times faster just for frequency and who knows how much faster in total. Say, 100 times.

So, 16 hours of philanthropy 20 years ago would be several minutes (I guess even seconds) today, but would cost me a lot of money, did not give any visible satisfaction, and probably would make me to change hardware twice more often. And all this sacrifice just to allow somebody make publications and receive moar grants.

So, imhilariouso, such crowdcalcing makes sense only if result is visible, significant (on purpose or just for fun) personally for you, and the job is short-term.
I.e. like a brainstorming. Sometimes brainstorming can probably give fast results, but nobody uses it as a long time strategy.

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You're not quite correct on resource usage, @Gargamel.  If you run one project on GPU only and another on CPU only, they'll run side by side (though Einstein GPU work now requires a full CPU in addition -- it used to be about 0.2 CPU).  I've just changed my BOINC settings back to shutting down when CPU usage exceeds 10% (which would be around 80% on any one core, indicating a likely game session), but when I'm not playing KSP, I get seven MilkyWay tasks and one Einstein task running in parallel.

And @kerbiloid, the point of BOINC is it runs on whatever you have.  For a short time a few years ago, I was running BOINC tasks on a 300 MHz Pentium II (they completed just about fast enough not to expire, if nothing caused a delay) on an old Win98 computer (revived with a lightweight Linux distro), alongside my desktop machine (then a Core2Duo 2.4 GHz).  If I have a machine I leave powered up all the time anyway (either because it's acting as a server, or just so I don't have to wait 2-5 minutes for a startup when I want to use it), it ought to be running some kind of background task to do something useful in its idle loop.  There are multiple distributed computing controllers now; BOINC is just the biggest one (as far as I know).  If you don't find a BOINC project you want to support, you might Google for other projects.  I think there's even one that does collective blockchain mining -- a single PC is too slow to be worth the power consumed as a dedicated Bitcoin rig (never mind Ethereum), but once again, if it's going to be left running anyway, there's no good reason not to let it do something in the background, and getting a share of the blockchain production of a cluster of a few thousand of those, for energy you'd use anyway, is like getting a discount on your electric bill.

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1 hour ago, Zeiss Ikon said:

And @kerbiloid, the point of BOINC is it runs on whatever you have.  For a short time a few years ago, I was running BOINC tasks on a 300 MHz Pentium II (they completed just about fast enough not to expire, if nothing caused a delay) on an old Win98 computer (revived with a lightweight Linux distro), alongside my desktop machine (then a Core2Duo 2.4 GHz).  If I have a machine I leave powered up all the time anyway

But without a background calculation program the computer is idle.
When any program is running, it uses CPU, memory, consumes additional energy.
So, instead of, say, 25% of full power, your computer gets running at, say, 75% of it. Consuming, say, 100 W more, i.e. ~2 kWh per day (multiply this by the electricity price at your place).

So, it's not just a usage of idle machine, it's daily paying for somebody's calculations. With no discount.
Say, if there is somebody's new medicine project, you will still pay full price for this medicine if needed. So, you will pay twice for it: once paying for their calculations, and again - buying the medicine.
If this is somebody's astronomical project like the mentioned neutron stars finding, you will even never know if your computers have found something, but for sure some astronomer will save money for his organization (because he uses your CPU instead of ordering his job hardware update),, make some articles in sci-journals, then receive money and grade, even without mentioning you.

In fact such software looks like a crowdfunding under fuzzy conditions when you even don't know how much exactly money you are spending on someone's needs.

300 MHz Pentiums are good, but they consume nearly as much energy as modern ones (twice less, iirc).
So, using them for such crowdfunding calculation is even more expensive.
Some data which could be calculated by your invisible beneficiary in ten minutes on his own i7, instead of those which are calculated on your 300 MHz Pentium in, say, 10 hours, having consumed corresponding amount of electricity.

So, he saved 0.05 kWh by using your old Pentium, and you've paid for 2 kWh from your own money.
It would be cheaper just to send him money.

(All numbers are arbitrary, I don't know how much exactly your  computers consume, and how much energy costs at your place)

Significance for humanity is also not obvious, as 20 years later (when these calculations indeed will be required), they will re-run the calculations on modern computers, making nowadays efforts useless like crowdcalcing on ZX Spectrums. So, it looks more like some people's short-term career jump sponsored by unnamed persons.

So, it's nice for a short-term single action with listed participants and participation conditions (like on kickstarter), but this way looks like a money leak.

(I've gifted all my old computers to my previous jobs for free.)

Edited by kerbiloid
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In fact, some BOINC projects do recognize the owner of a computer (or the team, since users can organize into groups) that actually found something.  Einstein, for instance, has given co-author credit to BOINC participants in their papers -- SETI has said they'll do so, if they ever find a signal.

And some projects exist with more immediate human benefits than Einstein or Milkyway -- Folding, for instance, seeks to "solve" the protein folding problem by using massively parallel computing to predict folding of proteins with known final shapes, in order to find an algorithm that can predict folding without knowing the final shape via x-ray crystallography or similar methods.  Solve that, and it'll be possible (for instance) to create designer drugs to fit a particular receptor site without lengthy trial and error -- just write a stretch of DNA that codes for the required amino acid sequence, and insert it into a strain of E. Coli (as was done with and actual human gene decades ago for insulin -- but in this case, the gene would be written from scratch) -- and do it at reasonable cost (more like the cost for a single treatment procedure than that to set up a pharmaceutical production process).

If you don't want to participate in BOINC or other distributed computing projects, then don't -- but relevance is a value judgment anyway.  I consider mapping the Milky Way's stellar populations to be relevant, because I expect mankind to need those maps eventually; I hope my mind, at least, will survive long enough to need them myself.

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7 hours ago, Zeiss Ikon said:

You're not quite correct on resource usage, @Gargamel.  If you run one project on GPU only and another on CPU only, they'll run side by side (though Einstein GPU work now requires a full CPU in addition -- it used to be about 0.2 CPU).  I've just changed my BOINC settings back to shutting down when CPU usage exceeds 10% (which would be around 80% on any one core, indicating a likely game session), but when I'm not playing KSP, I get seven MilkyWay tasks and one Einstein task running in parallel.

Oh, very true, but for the sake of discussion, I was simplifying what BOINC did down to "It runs when your screen saver is on". 

4 hours ago, Zeiss Ikon said:

In fact, some BOINC projects do recognize the owner of a computer (or the team, since users can organize into groups) that actually found something.  Einstein, for instance, has given co-author credit to BOINC participants in their papers -- SETI has said they'll do so, if they ever find a signal.

Yup, something I always found very cool.  They also do "high scores lists", where they show the amount of data processed.  I've been running various BOINC projects for close to 20 years now I want to say, and I'm nowhere near the top.   Some of these teams set up whole networks just to run BOINC. 

 

4 hours ago, Zeiss Ikon said:

If you don't want to participate in BOINC or other distributed computing projects, then don't -- but relevance is a value judgment anyway.  I consider mapping the Milky Way's stellar populations to be relevant, because I expect mankind to need those maps eventually; I hope my mind, at least, will survive long enough to need them myself.

Not mention, it's a screensaver.  Some of the graphics the projects employ make for some pretty cool visuals.   One of the reasons I'm hesitant to remove E@H is that the sky map the is spinning on my screen is very cool looking.    I've had visitors over that go "what is that?", and it's been a good conversation piece.     But of course, the scenery is secondary to the research. 

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On 8/19/2018 at 2:10 PM, Gargamel said:

Not mention, it's a screensaver.

I wish it were.  The Linux BOINC Manager and projects, as far as I've been able to find out, don't supply a screen saver (I presume that's because Linux has at least four different desktop environments that are only partly compatible).  They run in background when my screen saver is running, however.  I remember the SETI screen saver from before BOINC existed -- I turned it off because on the computer I had then (Windows 95/98, Pentium II 300 MHz with SVGA of some stripe -- been a long time) because the graphics significantly slowed down the task processing.

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  • 9 months later...
On 8/18/2018 at 1:09 PM, Gargamel said:

is it still worth my processor time to be running Einstein@home

Bumping this one to see if anybody has some other opinions on this....  Just had to reinstall BOINC, and I get my choices of which projects to join up to again....

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