From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4@msn.com)
Date: Mon Mar 04 2002 - 11:29:54 PST
http://www.dailycal.org/article.asp?id=7840
With increased traffic on the UC Berkeley campus network, the SETI@Home research project is being forced to reduce their capacity to process astronomy data.
SETI@Home, an acronym for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, is a screensaver program which sends raw radio astronomy data to 3 million individual computers worldwide for further analysis from UC Berkeley.
"We keep track of how many users have returned a result within the last four weeks, that number has gone down by only a few percent," said David Anderson, director of SETI@Home. "If it keeps up much longer, we'll lose significant numbers."
SETI@Home users receive "work units" from the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico which are then are analyzed and sent back to UC Berkeley as part of the ongoing search for intelligent alien life.
Normally, the entire campus network is limited to 70 megabits-per-second, of which SETI@Home traffic comprised nearly 25 megabits.
"There was plenty of capacity for both, and now there's not enough, and it sounds like there's not enough budget to raise that capacity for both the academic computing that SETI does and the academic computing that everybody else does," said Dan Werthimer, the chief scientist of SETI@Home.
However, since January, overall campus traffic has often exceeded the 70 megabit limit. This increase is attributed to both natural growth of Internet usage and also to the increased use of KaZaa, a music sharing program, said Cliff Frost, director of Communication and Network Services at UC Berkeley.
This network traffic is only limited to on-campus traffic and does not affect student living in the residence halls, who have a separate limit of 40 megabits-per-second which they pay for separately.
File sharing programs such as KaZaa and Morpheus lead to the implementation of a bandwidth cap of 30 megabits-per-second on the residence halls last fall, which was later increased by 10 megabits-per-second.
SETI@Home has agreed to regulate itself to under its normal usage to accommodate the increased bandwidth needs.
"(The) policy was changed so that SETI is given lower priority so we get whatever is left over after all other campus uses," said Anderson. "During those times, which are increasingly common, when campus uses goes all the way up to 70 (megabits-per-second), SETI gets squeezed and connections don't get through. A lot of users are frustrated because their computers are sitting there not doing anything."
There are currently plans under way to increase the bandwidth for SETI@Home.
"As of (Feb. 21), SETI@Home has agreed to pay $3,000 per month for an extra 10 megabits-per-second devoted to their project," said Frost. "They will continue to get to use whatever is leftover from the rest of campus's 70 megabits-per-second."
Werthimer described the situation as "frustrating." "It's frustrating that we had anybody that wanted to participate could, we'd like to make sure that everyone could participate," he said. "We have a tight budget, this is all supported by donations and non-profits. We can't afford to buy excess network capacity." Anderson agreed, in saying that SETI@Home cannot afford this $3,000 agreement for an extended period of time, and added that they are look for a "long-term solution."
"Longer term we're looking around for other ways, either to try to get a company to donate some network bandwidth or to reorganize the way our software works, instead of having to go through the bottleneck (at UC Berkeley)," he said.
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