At the end of this month the University has scheduled a power outage up here at SSL, which means our machines will have to go down, unfortunately. The outage will happen on the Sunday after Christmas and the Sunday after New Year’s (December 27th and January 3rd).

There are two options we have in dealing with this:

1. We could be down for only one day on two different occasions,
2. Or be down for the entire time between those two days.

If we choose the first options, we will lose a week of running time for SETI@Home. If we shut things down on Sunday but then get everything back up and running for a week in between, we could salvage that time. However, it would take half a day for Matt and Jeff to start everything back up on each occasion. Matt and Jeff will make the final decision on what will happen when the outage comes, so look for more updates on this situation on the SETI@home web page when the time draws nearer.

Bob is still working on solving the database problems. Now we need to get the AP database replicated, and that’s the final step. Hopefully this will be accomplished soon.

Andrew shared some computational news about Fly’s Eye:

The data set from Fly’s Eye is huge (about 20 terabytes) and we don’t really have anywhere to host it-so we’ve been exploring a couple alternative options:
1. An Amazon Web Services grant?
2. Open Science Grid (OSG) is a group of Universities and researchers that are trying to develop an infrastructure for storing particle physics datasets. We contacted them about our data storage problem, and they were excited about having us potentially work with them.
3. Convince the astronomy department to by a huge file server? Not in the near future, at least.

That's all this week! Happy Holidays, everyone!