SETI wants you!!

[Guest guest]

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is looking for signals from

intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and they have a whole lot of data to

analyse, coming fron the world's largest radio telescope in Aricibo in South

America.

To do it, they've developed a screensaver program that you can download and run

on

your computer, when your computer isn't in use it'll be analysing a chunk of

data

which you can watch, the graphics are pretty cool. The idea is that many small

computers can do the same work as one large supercomputer. When the analysis of

that

chunk is done, it'll ask you to connect to the SETI site and return the analysis

and

get a new chunk of data. The whole program is only 750K and downloads in a

couple of

minutes and installed and runs easily and smoothly on my computer.

Here's the website (click download seti@home)

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

 

love, andrew

 

 

Here's a bit from the SETI site explaining:

 

The Problem — Mountains of Data

 

Most of the SETI programs in existence today,

including those at UC Berkeley build large

computers that analyze that data from the telescope

in real time. None of these computers look very

deeply at the data for weak signals nor do they

look for a large class of signal types (which we'll

discuss further on...) The reason for this is because

they are limited by the amount of computer power

available for data analysis. To tease out the

weakest signals, a great amount of computer

power is necessary. It would take a monstrous

supercomputer to get the job done. SETI programs

could never afford to build or buy that computing

power. There is a trade-off that they can make.

Rather than a huge computer to do the job, they

could use a smaller computer but just take longer

to do it. But then there would be lots of data piling

up. What if they used LOTS of small computers, all

working simultaneously on different parts of the

analysis? Where can the SETI team possibly find

thousands of computers they'd need to analyze the

data continuously streaming from Arecibo?

 

The UC Berkeley SETI team has discovered that

there are already thousands of computers that

might be available for use. Most of these

computers sit around most of the time with toasters

flying across their screens accomplishing absolutely

nothing and wasting electricity to boot. This is

where SETI@home (and you!) come into the

picture. The SETI@home project hopes to

convince you to allow us to borrow your computer

when you aren't using it and to help us "…search

out new life and new civilizations." We'll do this

with a screen saver that can go get a chunk of data

from us over the internet, analyze that data, and

then report the results back to us. When you need

your computer back, our screen saver instantly gets

out of the way and only continues it's analysis when

you are finished with your work.

 

It's an interesting and difficult task. There's so much

data to analyze that it seems impossible!

Fortunately, the data analysis task can be easily

broken up into little pieces that can all be worked

on separately and in parallel. None of the pieces

depends on the other pieces. Also, there is only a

finite amount of sky that can be seen from Arecibo.

In the next two years the entire sky as seen from

the telescope will be scanned three times. We feel

that this will be enough for this project. By the time

we've looked at the sky three times, there will be

new telescopes, new experiments, and new

approaches to SETI. We hope that you will be

able to participate in them too!

 

love, andrew