SETI@home Entering "Hibernation"
After 21 years of existence, SETI@home will cease sending work units and enter “hibernation” on March 31. According to the announcement, “the web site and the message boards will continue to operate” and it is possible that work will be distributed again in the future, if “UC Berkeley astronomers will find uses for the huge computing capabilities of SETI@home for SETI or related areas like cosmology and pulsar research”. Also according to that announcement, the decision came as a result of “diminishing returns”, after having “analyzed all the data [they] need for now”, and the amount of work required “to manage the distributed processing of data” when they “need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results [they] already have, and writing this up in a scientific journal paper”. However, I’m far from the only one thinking that the recent database problems played a large part, and in the discussion you can see confirmations of that, as well as other factors, coming even from some of those directly involved.
In truth, those problems seem to be the only likely explanation for the timing. I mean, yes, the entire SETI program has been starved of funds for many years and, especially recently, SETI@home seemed to be severely lacking personnel as well, but while it all seemed to be hanging by a thread, they always seemed to do a good job of continuing to manage to hang on by that thread. And now there’s Breakthrough Listen as well, sending in new data, and there are also talks of using more telescopes for this, so it seems like, if anything, there would be even more data to analyze. And the recent funding drive seems to indicate that they had no intention of ending the project, and the recent increase in the maximum number of work units sent did seem to prove that there was actually even more work to do as well, and the fact that the value was first doubled and then reduced by a quarter, ending up 50% higher than it was before, as they were trying methods to mitigate the database problems, seems to be one more piece of evidence pointing to those problems as the real reason behind it all. But, of course, SETI@home has had serious problems like these before and got through them every time, and there are reports that money wouldn’t have really been a problem either, if only they’d have asked. As such, what it all adds up to is that those making these decisions probably just had enough, decided that they no longer care to put up with it, possibly in good part because of Nebula. It is, of course, possible that it all simply became too exhausting, and/or that personal matters weighed heavily in the decision, but ever since I first heard of Nebula I worried that SETI@home will stop being a priority and may eventually be scrapped.
As strange as it may sound, I find this simultaneously shocking and unsurprising. I mean, for the reasons stated above, I feared it and know I should have expected it, but at the same time I at the very least hoped that SETI@home will continue pretty much forever. It’s not that SETI’s the most worthy project my computer could work for, and I don’t believe it likely that this method could ever be the one to confirm the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial beings anyway, so that has little to nothing to do with finding alien radio signals or any other stated goals, and much to do with personal matters, mental links and how much I commit to something once I start it. I mean, any computer I used since the original SETI@home client was updated to handle proxy connections, since I was on one at the time, worked for SETI@home constantly ever since, with just a few quick dashes to climateprediction.net, MilkyWay@home and World Community Grid‘s Clean Energy Project – Phase 2 when SETI@home couldn’t generate work for a longer amount of time. And it was also something I got Andra somewhat interested in back in the day as well, though shortly after she left she told me that she did install BOINC there, but attached to multiple projects, and it’s likely that she lost interest in it altogether soon after.
So, yes, I feel quite committed to SETI@home. There was a plan to split the processing time equally between it and one other project when I’ll get a CPU with four cores, but when I had to give up on that plan, I dropped that idea as well. Not that I found anything that “spoke” to me in a similar manner when I did search, since I’d only willingly split the processing time in that manner with an environmental project and there are hardly any of those. The Clean Energy Project is now over as well, and something about how World Community Grid works bothers me anyway, so what I’d be looking for would be an environmental project that shows up on its own on the BOINC projects list, and it would seem that climateprediction.net remains the only one to fit that condition, and questionably at that. However, that bothered me for other reasons back in the day, as I’m also obviously only looking for something that I can fully trust to be safe and free of bugs, and that works pretty much exactly like SETI@home does, also allowing me to check what my computer’s doing in the same manner, which also means finishing multiple work units per day. In addition, because of the computer I have, it’s important for it to use a similarly low amount of RAM and not write too much to disk, and I must also be able to store enough work units for at least several days and know that I’ll be able to trust it to reliably send enough work to keep my computer busy all the time on its own for the foreseeable future.
In the end… I must thank the people who created and maintained SETI@home for these nearly 21 years. For me personally, it meant a whole lot more than “donating” computer time or searching for alien signals or any other actual science goal, stated or not. And, of course, for the world in general it mainly meant creating BOINC and making the entire concept of distributed computing known and interesting, leading to many of the other projects and contributing to much of their success. As such, it’s mainly out of that commitment to SETI@home that I definitely will attach to another BOINC project and continue in the same manner, something having to do with astronomy being an option unless or until I’ll find a suitable environmental one. At the moment, I guess that the two projects I briefly attached to before that still exist, climateprediction.net and MilkyWay@home, are the first options, but I’ll see what will actually happen in the end. It’s quite frustrating that I’ll fall a few tens of thousands short of reaching a total credit of 7.5 million for SETI@home by the time it’ll stop sending work though.
