Archive for December, 2005

16 DecRouters With Location Information

I ran a wireless access point finder on the bus on the way home tonight, travelling the 2.2 miles from Bancroft & Telegraph on UC Berkeley’s campus to Market St. & Stanford Ave. in Emeryville/Oakland near my place. It located 175 access points in those two miles. 61 of the APs (35%) used no encryption. What was interesting about it was that at almost every moment of the trip there were at least two or three active signals.

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This made me think, if GPS technology were cheaper and were put into a future generation of wireless routers (which presumably will also have far better range) then even those who wanted to deny access to their bandwidth via WEP could at least broadcast: “I’m located at these coordinates” and then future mobile devices could ping all these routers and triangulate their position too.

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I suppose people already have plans to do this using cell phone towers. I was just sort of intrigued by the thought of the general public creating the network rather than the cellular companies. I think one problem with the idea is that if the GPS technology were so cheap that it could go in every router, then it would also be cheap enough to go in whatever mobile device was hoping to do the triangulation.

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I guess this brings me back to my original thought, (which I haven’t written about yet): rather than having GPS in the routers, it should just be possible for the user to enter their coordinates and broadcast them. This is basically free, requiring only some know-how on the part of the router owner. (It should be noted that of the 175 APs the SSIDs had often not been changed from their defaults: 36 2WIRExxx, 3 Apple Network xxx, 5 belkin54g, 5 default, 10 linksys, 7 NETGEAR, etc. providing some indication that people just plug them in and don’t do any configuration, and consequently counting against the chances that they’ll enter their latitude and longitude!)

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The reason I didn’t mention this first was the opt-in problem but also the abuse problem. A wise guy is sure to claim that his router in Berkeley is actually located in Fiji, so a mechanism for discounting bad data would have to be built into the triangulating technology. I don’t know. There’s potential for something here. Maybe someone can work it out in the comments.

12 DecA New Beginning for SETI@Home

Five years ago today, on Dec. 12, 2000, I created an account with the SETI@Home project and signed up my computer(s) to help analyze radio signals from the Aricebo telescope in search of signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. SETI@Home, while not the first volunteer distributed computing (DC) project, is certainly the most popular and most widely-known. The “Classic” version of the client has attracted 5,436,301 users who have been dazzled by the screen saver that illustrates the radio signal one’s computer is analyzing.

The SETI@Home team also contributed to the creation of BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. BOINC is basically the ‘@Home’ portion of volunteer DC projects, providing a middle-ware infrastructure upon which other DC projects can operate and obtain volunteer computing resources. SETI@Home has transitioned its work onto the BOINC platform and now has nearly 310,000 users moved over to the new platform providing access to around 625,000 computers. The computing power of the combined BOINC SETI users, who provide 9,674.2 GigaFLOPs of processing prowess, is considerable. It would place the BOINC SETI users at the 29th slot in the Top 500 Supercomputers list. All of BOINC combined comes in at 101,725.5 GigaFLOPs, or #2 on the Supercomputer list. (IBM’s BlueGene/L does 280,600 GigaFLOPs and cost over $100 million.)

The “Classic” SETI@Home client will be forever shut down in just three days, on December 15, 2005. In the two weeks since a story announcing the transition appeared on slashdot.org on November 23, the number of new users of the BOINCified SETI has grown by over 58,000 or 23%. Other BOINC projects, such as Einstein@Home, Rosetta@Home, and Predictor@Home have seen a similar increase in their user base over that time period. Einstein +13,000 (+19%), Rosetta +15,000 (+165%!!!), and Predictor +6,650 (+20%). However, SETI still accounts for 63.4% of the work done by BOINC users.

Of all those who joined SETI@Home on the same day as me, five years ago, 84 have persevered and submitted work units within the last month. My last work unit submitted was in January of this year, having completed 1,872 work units taking 4.106 years of CPU time, averaging 1.02 results per day. This places me in 188,402nd place among SETI Classic users, a rank shared by 82 others. I completed more work units than 96.533% of SETI@Home Classic users.

Currently the computers I have myself are fairly busy acting as servers or as my personal laptop, but the student group at Boalt I am so overly-involved with, boalt.org, now has its own BOINC teams where the boalt.org office computers and computers of members contribute to various BOINC projects. You’re welcome to join us.