And, here is what Dan said about Arecibo in an email exchange a few minutes ago.

> arecibo just received funding for another five years,
> and we expect NSF and NASA will continue
> for several decades.

Avinash

SETI@Home has one important asset: it's installed base of millions of clients. Could we utilize this resource somehow?

How about this: we set up a new BOINC server, dedicated to the setiQuest community. This server will differ from SETI@Home's server in that anyone in our community will be able to propose new experiments (algorithms etc.) to run on the server. There will be a process by which new experiments are submitted, approved and installed on the server. This process will largely be driven by setiQuest volunteers (like, say, me), but UC Berkeley will have the final say in which experiments are accepted for inclusion.

Now, the idea is that, every once in a while, when the UC Berkeley folks feel they have spare computing cycles, their server will redirect connecting SETI@Home clients to our server for new work. Our server will then send algorithms and work units for a currently running experiment back to these clients. Depending on how UC Berkeley manages the redirects, this can potentially be a lot of clients. The clients begin crunching away and return the results to our server. Whoever initiated the experiment can then follow the outcome there.

For instance, imagine that sigblips has seen something unusual in a data file. He wants to run an CPU-intensive analysis on the file to examine the feature, but it will take far too long on his own computer, and even in Amazon's cloud. He therefore sets up the analysis as an experiment on our BOINC server, and have it approved. Soon, his analysis is being computed by thousands of SETI@Home clients world-wide, completing it in no time - and perhaps they find something interesting.

This would require some coordination with the UC Berkeley folks, and updating of the SETI@home client, most probably. But nothing that isn't doable.

Hi,

This is an old thread, but it looks like a reasonable place to post on this topic. I would be interested in hearing general comparisons and contrasts between the SETI Institute's focus, hardware, data analysis, etc. and that of S@H. Obviously, S@H and SI are looking at separate data sets from different telescopes. Does that make a difference in how the data is treated? Are the S@H "enhanced" and "astropulse" applications similar to the software SI uses to analyze signals. Does SI look for pulses? Does SI do additional types of processing? (More succinctly, I guess I'm asking how Sonata compares to the S@H apps.) 

Due to the nature of S@H, much processor time is devoted to cross-validation of results from different clients. How does that compare to SI's validation methods?

Jill Tarter often speaks of Moore's Law when speaking publicly. My impression is that processor power is far more of a bottleneck than telescope data, at this point, despite the fact that the Allen Array currently has far fewer nodes than eventually planned. Just what kind of computing horsepower do you have? Is it all CPU? All x86_64? Any GPU or other, more exotic platforms?

I realize that I've asked quite a few (possibly disparate) questions here. I'd be happy to see comments on any subset (or superset) of these subjects, or a pointer to where some of them have already been answered.

Thanks.
Steve Bergman

Here is a perfect idea for collaboration:

SETI@home now has something called Near Time Persistency Checker (NTPCKR). The NTPCKR identifies candidates in SETI@home's database that appear persistent in the sky across multiple observations.

Currently, when NTPCKR identifies a persistent candidate, it may be months before Arecibo swings past that patch of sky again so the team can verify or falsify the candidate. Why not lend them a hand?

A system could be devised that lets the NTPCKR submit persistent candidates as a recommended target for the ATA. If the target is accepted, SonATA can check it out, as can we in the setiQuest community, if the data is uploaded to the cloud.

Not only would it be faster than Arecibo, it would also constitute the second observation from another location which is necessary for confirmation.

Apart from being meaningful SETI, this would also be a nice gesture towards the community around SETI@home, which is still much larger and more vibrant than ours. It could be a good way to get more people interested in setiQuest.