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.edu
SETI, 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?
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 the BOINC client 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!
Learn more about SETI@Home
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/
I also use the same software - BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for
Network Computing) - to run climate prediction models. My hopes are
that this research will allow scientists to predict global weather changes
for the 21st century, allowing governments, public service agencies
and individuals be better prepared for climate effects and extreems.
Climate changes impact food and energy availability and could have a
profound effect on our future welfare if we are not prepared.
Learn more about Climate Prediction
http://www.climateprediction.net/index.php
View my profile on the SETI server or my Climate Prediction profile
on the CPDN server
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