| Most of the SETI programs in existance 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 availale 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 a screen saver 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! |
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