SETI@home By Phillip Pride CS 415 Dr. Carl
Background Info on SETI Stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence ● Uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio ● signals These signals are considered unnatural and are an ○ indication of extraterrestrial technology Consist of mainly noise from celestial sources and the ● receiver’s electronics and man-made signals (TV stations, radar, and satellites)
Background Info on SETI cont... Most SETI programs use large supercomputers that ignore ● weak signals and don’t look for a large class of signal types The computing power necessary to analyze weak signals ● exceeds the capabilities of these machines
Enter SETI@home In 1995, David Gedye proposes using a virtual supercomputer ● composed of large numbers of Internet-connected computers In May of 1999 SETI@home officially launches at U.C. Berkeley ● When it first launched, the creators were only expecting about ● 1,000 volunteers, but ended up with ~1,000,000 and lacked the server space to accommodate the numbers
Enter SETI@home cont... Progress came to a halt until Sun Microsystems donated ● computers to help out the program Over 4 million people have tried the program ●
How it works Data is collected from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico ● and recorded on high-density tapes. About one 35 Gbyte DLT tape per day. Tapes are sent to Berkeley through snail mail ● Divided into 0.25 Mbyte chunks (work-units) and sent to ● computers Work units are sent out multiple times to ensure they are ● processed correctly When not in use, your computer uses a screensaver that gets ● data from UC Berkeley over the internet, analyzes it, and sends back the results
How it works cont... When analyzing the data sent, your computer looks for spikes ● in the signal that are considered abnormal In the case of the Arecibo telescope, this means any signal that ● gets louder, then softer over the course of 12 seconds The amount of time it takes for a target to cross the focus ○ of Arecibo Your computer will test signals at different to find one with a ● possible extraterrestrial source
Citations http://setiathome.berkeley.edu
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