SETI@home Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description

SETI@home (SETI at home) is a distributed computing project for Internet-connected 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 its launch on May 17, 1999, the project has logged over 2 million years of aggregate computing time. On September 26, 2001, SETI@home had performed a total of 10²¹ floating point operations. It is acknowledged by the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest computation in history. 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 transferring 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.

Table of contents

1 Breaking News 2 See also 3 External links

Breaking News

On Sep 1, 2004, an interesting signal SHGb02 14a was announced.

See also

• Folding at home
• distributed.net

External links

• SETI@home
• SETI@home (BOINC beta test page)
• Wikipedia team for SETI@home
• Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC)
• SETI Net - A one man attempt to build the machinery, electronics necessary to detect a signal
• Guinness Book Of World Records entry

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