Add alien hunters and scientists studying the origins of the universe to the list of people getting frustrated with the cryptocurrency trend. The stories of overnight millionaires and digital mining have caused a global run on computer chips. Scientists at SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) find themselves left out in the cold.

The issue lies with graphics processing units (GPUs). These specialized circuits are designed to alter and manipulate a computer's memory to speed up the creation of images. They've served numerous purposes over the years, including workstations to self-driving cars, though their primary function has always been found in video games.

Thanks to cryptocurrency, that's starting to change. In a recent call with investors, Nvida admitted that cryptocurrency was driving up its GPU sales. "Whether it’s deep learning or virtual reality or cryptocurrency — you name it — it’s going to find its way to us," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told VentureBeat. "The mega trend is that GPU computing has come into its time." Asked about GPU scarcity due to cryptocurrency, Huang says that GPU makers must "be mindful of its existence."

But for SETI researchers, that mindfulness is a cold comfort. SETI researchers need the computing power of GPUs to crunch data from large listening arrays like the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia.

"We'd like to use the latest GPUs... and we can't get 'em," Dan Werthimer, chief SETI scientist of UC Berkeley, tells the BBC.

Part of the problem arises from the fact that aliens truly are unknown to humanity. "We want to look at as many frequency channels as we possibly can because we don't know what frequency ET will be broadcasting on and we want to look for lots of different signal types," Werthimer says."Is it AM or FM? What communication are they using? That takes a lot of computing power."



Werthimer's team at Berkeley currently has around 100 GPUs, and the Berkeley SETI Research Center was hoping to give the Green Bank, as well as the Project Phoenix at Parkes, Australia, an expansion. "We've got the money, we've contacted the vendors, and they say, 'We just don't have them,'" he says.

When scientists can find the chips, they're often being sold at high markup. Aaron Parsons, also of Berkeley, helps run HERA, the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array . HERA aims to study the universe around 400 million after the Big Bang, a time period when the predominantly neutral universe became ionized, possibly by stars, galaxies, quasars, or some combination of the three. Studying the Epoch of Reionization is crucial to understanding the formation of the universe.



Parsons' team budgeted for expensive GPUs, expecting to spend $500 per set. Crypto-fever doubled the costs to $1,000 per.

"We'll be able to weather it but it is coming out of our contingency budget," Parsons says to the BBC. "We're buying a lot of these things, it's going to end up costing about $32,000 extra."

As chips designed specifically for cryptocurrency come onto the market, scientists across the globe are hoping that the pressure on GPUs will began to ease, even a bit. As it stands, Werthimer says, the run on GPUs is "limiting our search for extra-terrestrials, to try to answer the question, 'Are we alone? Is there anybody out there?'"

Source: BBC

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