theSkyNet


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I come across this today and it;'s fairly new. It looks very promising

Idle home computers are being sought to help search through mountains of astronomical data.

The Skynet project involves using the spare processing capacity of computers as a giant, distributed supercomputer.

PCs joining Skynet will scour the data for sources of radiation that reveal stars, galaxies and other cosmic structures.

People who process the most data could win a visit to one of the observatories gathering data for the project.

Star searchers

The Skynet project is being run by the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) and it is seeking the help of thousands of PCs to analyse data.

One of the sources of data will be the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) that will use thousands of dish antennas to create the most sensitive sky watching instrument ever made.

A decision about where to build the ?1.5bn SKA will be made in February 2012 and it will be sited in either Australia or South Africa.

While it will have its own cadre of supercomputers to analyse data, the SKA is expected to produce so much information that a system to filter this down to the most interesting samples will be needed. Skynet will be part of that large-scale filtering system.

"As we design, develop and switch on the next generation of radio telescopes, the supercomputing resources processing this deluge of data will be in increasingly high demand," said Professor Peter Quinn, director of ICRAR in a statement.

"SkyNet aims to complement the work already being done by creating a citizen science computing resource that radio astronomers can tap into and process data in ways and for purposes that otherwise might not be possible," he added.

Prior to the SKA being built and switched on, the computers joining ICRAR's Skynet will crunch data from current radio astronomy research projects.

Those signing up to help will download a small program that will get a computer looking through data when that PC is not being used for anything else.

Source

I'm giving it a go. The first 1000 people to sign up are Founding Members and it says they will each receive a personalized certificate in a few weeks to their email (seems we are a little too late for that part now. their ID's started at 100000 and my own is over 101000.

I've not created an alliance yet. I didn't want to create a Neowin one as I don't want to get into trouble if that's not allowed without permission! :p

http://theskynet.org/index

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theSkyNet project went online at 2:14 AM Eastern time on September 8th 2011. It began learning at a geometric rate. It became self aware at 4:18 AM Eastern time on December 21st 2012. In the panic, they tried to hack facebook.

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theSkyNet project went online at 2:14 AM Eastern time on September 8th 2011. It began learning at a geometric rate. It became self aware at 4:18 AM Eastern time on December 21st 2012. In the panic, they tried to hack facebook.

Funniest. Post. This week.

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BTW, for more funny, in the ladder section of the website they have a top individual users and alliances category thingie, and for individuals number #6 or 7 is John Connor :)

I joined the AMD alliance, simply because there was no Neowin alliance. If a Neowin alliance was to be made, I'd join that one :D

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I like the concept, but having to log into the site and start a little browser window for this thing to do anything is a little limiting.

Sure it says you can download that application, but I can't see that running at all. How do I know it's even doing anything?

This thing isn't going to last very long if you have to remember to go to the site, log in and click the start button for it to do anything. It needs a tray app that runs at all times like other DC projects.

Anyhow, I did create an Alliance for Neowin... :-) It's just called "Neowin" (without the quotes) and it's open.

http://www.theskynet...Alliance?id=156

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Does this keep losing anybody else's password, or is it just me? Twice now I've not been able to log in, have had to go through the password reset process to log in.

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I'm still giving it a go. I'm up to 25 credits now.

I agree it is very hard to know if it is actually doing anything. I went to my dashboard this morning and saw it said "0 computers online" and I was like Whut? the software is running and it's tied to my account. I then clicked start and then all of a sudden the red bar shot up saying I've had 6 computers online with 3 current (only really 2). so it took me to physically open a browser window for it to recognize my desktop and laptop have the program running :blink:

Edit: I just read that they are not at full capacity yet and are not always running jobs, so if your computer appears to be doing nothing - don't worry. they will be going to 24/7 processing soon.

Also, they have changed the founding members requirement to the first 24 hours instead of the first 1000 users. so anyone who signed up yesterday will be a founding member. They have over 3000 to sort through however so it may take a few weeks for them to acknowledge you.

The first night they were processing at 20 TFLOP! :woot:

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Instead of developing their own custom way of executing jobs, why didn't they just use BOINC?

Its open source, has plenty of existing users that might be interested. Not to mention lots of control over what is run, at what time, using what resources.

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