SETI@home: More Data Than Ever Before

To the best of my knowledge, SETI@home was the first project of its kind. Having lived and worked in Berkeley (which is also SETI@home's home), I can say that it seems fitting that the project continues its search for alien civilizations.

But SETI@home isn't home alone these days, thanks in large part to the BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) platform, which has spawned similar projects, such as folding@home and cosmology@home. All in all, says project chief scientist Dan Werthimer, there are now 42 BOINC-based projects.

Still, SETI@home remains top dog, so to speak, in terms of participation. More than 5 million volunteers have signed up for SETI@home, with 170,000 dedicated users providing resources from 320,000 computers. You'd think that would be enough compute power, even for the likes of ET. But you'd be wrong.

Thanks to the world's largest and recently upgraded radio telescope Arecibo, more data is being generated than 320,000 computers can process--which means that the folks at the SETI@home project are looking for more volunteer computers to crunch the data. According to project scientist Eric Korpela, that data amounts to 300 gigabytes per day, or 100 terabytes (100,000 gigabytes) per year.

So if you can spare a few cycles in the middle of the night, give SETI@home a chance. Who knows what sort of otherworldly being you might run across.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 04:19 PM  Permalink