- The title of this article given above is incorrect, due to technical limitations. The correct title is
SETI@home.
SETI@home (SETI at home) is a distributed
computing project for home computers, hosted by the University of California, Berkeley. SETI is an acronym for the Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence. SETI@home's purpose is to analyze data incoming from the Arecibo radio telescope, searching for possible evidence of radio transmissions from extraterrestrial intelligence. With over 5 million users worldwide, the project is the most
successful example of distributed computing to date.
It performs three main tests:
- searching for Gaussian rises and falls in transmission power,
possibly representing the antenna passing over a
radio source
- searching for pulses possibly representing a narrowband digital-style
transmission
- searching for triplets, three pulses in a row
Since 1999, the project has logged nearly 2 million years of aggregate computing time.
On September 26, 2001, SETI@home had
performed a total of 1021 floating point operations. While
the project has not found any conclusive signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, it has identified several candidate spots for further
analysis.
The SETI@home distributed computing software, available for all major operating systems, runs either as a screensaver or continuously while a user works, utilizing otherwise wasted processor power for useful research.
SETI@Home was the first popular distributed computing application. However, some believe now that unused computer cycles could be
better spent on projects that have more direct benefits to the human race, such as Folding at Home.
SETI@home, in addition to its altruistic use to aid SETI, is quite useful as a stress testing tool for computer
workstations. Since it uses error-correction algorithms to verify the results of the computations, SETI@home is often used to check on the reliability of a computer configuration when overclocking.
There are future plans to get data from the Parkes
Observatory in Australia to analyse the southern hemisphere. SETI@home is in
the process of tranferring to a new software platform called Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) that
will allow testing for more types of signals as well as let users to contribute to other distributed computing projects running
on the BOINC platform.
See also
External links
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