Search for Extra-Terrestial Intelligence (SETI)You don't waste your computers power by turning it off do you?SETI@Home uses computers like yours and mine to process recorded radio waves from outer space. This gives SETI more active computing power than any super computer in the world. It's not a joke... it is scientific reaserch run at the Berkeley University in California. http://setiathome.berkeley.eduSETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is a scientific effort seeking to determine if there is intelligent life outside Earth. SETI researchers use many methods. One popular method, radio SETI, listens for artificial radio signals coming from other stars. SETI@home is a radio SETI project that lets anyone with a computer and an Internet connection participate. How SETI@Home works 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? 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! Learn more about SETI@Home http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/learnmore.html About my SETI work: The SETI web site says: "You have completed more work units than 97.586% of our users." As of Tue Jun 17 10:08:17 2003 UTC: Member of Data Crunch Team: Phoenix
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