EEVblog #871 - Find Aliens With Your Raspberry Pi!

How many MIPS per Watt is the Raspberry Pi 2 compared to Dave's dual processor Xeon machine?
And the awesome Paul Horowitz:
Dave's machines on SETI:

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[stationplaza]

Always good to hear Dave wittering away about tech stuff in the background while I'm the kitchen getting the Sunday roast done.
I do hope his Raspberry Pie turned out well.

[sahalin]

Dave is looking for those aliens that smashed his solar panel. :)

[TheAkashicTraveller]

You see that multicoloured square in the top right corner on the RPi screen? That means it's browning out, it needs more POWER.

[jovanjanevski]

Hello Dave, You see the four pixel stretched icon constantly standing in the upper right corner? I think it means You don't have enough power for Your pi. You need more amps or if the usb peripherals plus the pi power requirements exceed 5V 1.2A (0.6A by default but can be changed in the config) You'll need an USB powered hub.

[John_Ridley]

I support SETI but I am not going to draw hundreds of more watts for it. Multiplied out by all users, SETI is probably causing megawatts, maybe hundreds of megawatts, of extra draw.

Also, one good CUDA core graphics card can spank a whole bank of CPUs. I was amazed the first time I spun up an nVidia card - it wasn't even an expensive one, but it was doing more work than the other 4 machines put together, one of them a quad core.

[Mythricia]

I was actually setting up BOINC on my desktop just yesterday, good reminder to include SETI on the list of projects.

[markloukko]

Hi Dave, It would be interesting to run a MIPS/W comparisons between your 12 cores and single GPU. The GPU will compete work units much faster. By default, the GPU will only process one work unit at a time and that probably won’t max it out. To run more concurrently (max 2 or 3) change your app_config.xml. Comparing the GPU, CPU and Raspberry Pi might be very interesting.

[JoshHighley]

I used BOINC in an enterprise environment a few years ago. We pushed it to a couple hundred employee desktops in order to tackle a very parallel analysis issue we had. I'm not sure now, but at the time, the management tools weren't well suited to hundreds of PCs. However, the BOINC dev was very helpful and made some changes I needed to create groups of PCs. We were migrating from dual core Intels to triple core AMDs and it was amazing the jump in MIPS. I can't imagine what it would be now. It's important to realize that BOINC does not create a 'big computer', but rather allows running a lot of tasks in parallel on a lot of different computers; BOINC distributes and manages the tasks.

[TheEPROM]

I love the Raspberry Pi, I love Linux and I love the CLI interface.

[TheBrightPixel]

A cluster running off your solar panels would be super!

[Zadster]

I started my new i7 running something similar when I first got it, then I worked out just how much power it was consuming running all the cores 24 hours a day! If only you knew someone who had a solar panel array, which was generating excess cheap power during the day, you could run the Pi cluster off that! *Strokes chin*

[MexieMex]

Curious about the downvotes on this video, are they aliens who don't want to be found?

[zaferatakan]

11:44 Just imagine someone hijacking one of those projects for bitcoin mining.

[kkendall]

Thanks Dave, I'm now inspired to build a RP cluster for SETI. 5 to 10 nodes to start

[NazmiFR]

About the text editor not being able to save a config file it's normal: it was not started as superuser, if you did start it as a superuser (which would need you to type a command line anyway), you could have edited that file but nano is so much better and efficient :)

[MoTown]

I have been running SETI since it began. It ran much smoother when I could afford to upgrade my home PC from i486 to a Pentium. Still have the i486 but as December 2005 all my computers now run FOSS, either Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or Puppy Linux. Under Windows the graphic display was setup to replace my screensaver so while my PC was idle the SETI graphic ran. Its basically the same now as it was back at the start. I was happy to learn about BOINC a couple years into the SETI program. There were about 10 other projects that users could apply their PC's to besides SETI when BOINC was first introduced. Since i don't run Windows any longer I prefer to have SETI run in the background, especially my use of the PC is idle because the graphical display uses resources. Not that many now. Processing speed and RAM is very affordable now so one can be less concerned about not using resources that will take away from programs running when the human is not at the keyboard.

[Mythricia]

Astronoids - a small -rocky- body orbiting the sun, previously a living inhabitant of planet Earth.

I'm finding this a lot funnier than I should *wipes tears*

[DrRChandra]

It's not the editor's fault that the user as whom you log in cannot write to system files. If you were to use "sudo gedit", "sudo leafpad", or similar, it'd work just fine. Nano's fine too.

[MCFOX]

Thanks for the Boinc info I always fancied working for cern....

[stefanmannn]

I miss them old pc trash-find teardowns.