[HN Gopher] SETI@home: Data Acquisition and Front-End Processing...
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SETI@home: Data Acquisition and Front-End Processing (2025)
Author : tosh
Score : 85 points
Date : 2026-02-23 09:58 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (iopscience.iop.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (iopscience.iop.org)
| bpoyner wrote:
| _This paper describes the front end of SETI@home and provides
| parameters for the primary data source, the Arecibo Observatory_
|
| _Most of this data was recorded commensally at the Arecibo
| observatory over a 22 yr period_
|
| Interesting as Arecibo collapsed in December of 2020. It sounds
| like they have a lot of data to still churn through.
| PokemonNoGo wrote:
| >Most radio SETI projects process data in near real-time using
| special purpose analyzers at the telescope. SETI@home takes a
| different approach. It records digital time-domain (also called
| baseband) data, and distributes it over the internet to large
| numbers of computers that process the data, using both CPUs and
| GPUs.
|
| Definetly something going on here I'm not following.
|
| >SETI@home is in hiberation. We are no longer distributing
| tasks. [0]
|
| Is this paper really old or something? I would love to turn on
| my clients again :D
|
| [0 ]https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/
| elicash wrote:
| They went into hibernation, in terms of accepting new inputs,
| several years ago. They had more data than they could handle
| and switched to just analyzing existing data and final
| reports.
| drb493 wrote:
| The distributed compute part of the project has turned off
| but data analysis continues.
|
| I know what you mean these types of projects inspired me to
| contribute as a young citizen scientist.
|
| A different domain, but https://foldingathome.org/ is still
| running. Using distributed compute to study protein folding.
| washedDeveloper wrote:
| If you are looking for a good list of these types of
| projects: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php
| alexpotato wrote:
| Wasn't this largely solved by DeepMind's AlphaFold?
|
| https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/
| drb493 wrote:
| I'd discourage claiming any biological process is
| "solved."
|
| But to your point: No--AlphaFold is an amazing machine
| learning approach to predicting protein structure but
| Folding@Home is still immensely useful for simulating how
| proteins fold up over a timescale. They are/will be
| complimentary methods.
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11892350/
| elicash wrote:
| With the final analysis of this project complete, I do wonder if
| there's a way to bring it back with distributed agents doing the
| part that was so time-intensive for researchers that they had to
| kill it.
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| Immediate nostalgia activated. I ran this on a Pentium machine (I
| think) at home, still living with my parents. Sometimes I yearn
| for the optimism and relative naivete of those times.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Pentium 3 in a crusty Compaq with a 5.25" bigfoot hard drive.
|
| Those were the days
| sjm-lbm wrote:
| I still have both the screensaver _and_ the moment that I
| realized that disabling the screensaver allowed processing to
| happen meaningfully quicker burned into my mind.
| saganus wrote:
| I was running my K6-2 and I was _convinced_ it was superior to
| equivalent Intel CPUs.
|
| Spent hours watching the graph hoping to get triplets and some
| kind of confirmation that I just found ET.
|
| Miss those days so much.
| j79 wrote:
| Same. Although with the curse of hindsight, I painfully recall
| choosing to run SETI@home instead of "mining" some weird
| digital currency called Bitcoin back in 2010. So, painful.
| Kalpaka wrote:
| Something about SETI@home that doesn't get said enough: it didn't
| just do science, it created a category.
|
| Before it, "distributed computing" meant institutional grids,
| cluster access, gated systems. SETI@home proved that aggregating
| idle cycles from millions of ordinary machines was a legitimate
| scientific method. That proof changed what was possible.
|
| Folding@home came next. BOINC was built to formalize the
| template. Distributed citizen science became a recognized mode of
| doing research. None of that path was obvious before SETI@home
| walked it first.
|
| What's strange is that cheap cloud compute kind of ended this era
| not by failing but by succeeding. Why donate your CPU when AWS is
| a credit card away? The economics shifted. But something got lost
| too -- the screensaver running while you slept, the knowledge
| that your specific machine was doing something real in the world.
| That personal connection to a distributed effort hasn't really
| been replicated.
|
| elicash's question is the right one. Could distributed agents
| revive the model? Maybe. But I suspect the hard part isn't the
| architecture -- it's recreating the feeling that your
| contribution matters when it's one of ten million.
| poorman wrote:
| I was just thinking about this project the other day. Seems we
| have a whole lot of unused compute (and now GPU). I wish someone
| would create a meaningful project like this to distribute AI
| training or something. Imagine underfunded AI researchers being
| able to distribute work to idle machines like SETI@home did.
| wiz21c wrote:
| Asked Gemini about that: "are there efforts to train big LLM in
| a distributed fashion a la seti@home ? "
|
| answer was really interesing: -
| https://github.com/PrimeIntellect-ai/prime -
| https://www.together.ai/
| torcete wrote:
| We used to use computing power to search for ET signals, now we
| mine bitcoins.
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| That's probably because that's what the aliens want us to be
| doing. They can't have just everybody snooping around their
| harvesting operations.
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