SETI@home needs You!
Search for alien life needs more processors
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SETI@home, the distributed computing project, is calling for more volunteers willing to donate their computers' downtime to the project which scans radio telescope data for evidence of intelligent alien life.
Volunteers download a small programme which acts something like a screensaver - it kicks into life when your computer is not doing anything. The software then crunches small parts of data from radio telescopes looking for patterns which could suggest intelligent life. Although each individual computer does not achieve very much, using hundreds of computers means a lot of data can be analysed. SETI stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
The reason that more computing power is needed is that the project has more data to deal with. The world's radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico is being fitted with more sensitive receivers - the SETI@home software has been upgraded to deal with that increased information.
The project will now be dealing with some 300 gigabytes of data a day - about 100 terabytes a year, equivalent to the entire US Library of Congress. The SETI@home project has been running since May 1999 - it was the internet's first distributed computing project. It is headquarted at Berkeley Space Sciences, University of California.
Over eight years it has had more than five million volunteers. The network currently has 170,000 volunteers running 320,000 computers.
SETI@home's press release is here, and the project resides here.
The project is sponsored by Sun Microsystems, Intel, ProCurve Networking and Network Appliance amongst others. ®
COMMENTS
@ Andrew Norton
A related project to the one you mentioned is being run from the Queen Mary University, LHC@home. Granted it uses BOINC as the framework, it is still a worthwhile program to think about for those interested in applied science applications.
An article with appropriate links at The Reg mentioned it last October, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/17/cern_distributedcomputer_to_london/
The project has few work units currently since the Large Hadron Collider in Cern isn't operational yet. The system should be fully up around June this year, and the volunteer machines may well be kept busy depending on the number of experiments being run. (The few work units occasionally available now are probably just tests of the system and to keep the volunteers happy.) You can find out more about it at http://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/
Kibble
P.S. I'm currently running SETI@home, Einstein@home, and LHC@home and have been for years under the Amateur Radio Operators team for each.
Aliens - You got to be kidding
At the end of the day, do you think, if they actually discovered anything they would tell you? Knowing that we are not alone, would just cause mass hysteria, and for what? Helping the government out.....
Come on - Benefit Human Existance by helping to research something that will help the Human Race.
I've been folding since Grid started
Scott
"SETI stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Life."
"SETI stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Life."
That spells SETL, in the words of google "did you mean Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence?"
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