SETI at 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 nearly 5 million users worldwide, the project is perhaps the most successful example of distributed computing.
It performs three notable 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
The SETI@home distributed computing software is available for major operating systems, and runs as a screensaver or continuously while a user works, converting otherwise wasted processor power into useful research.
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 a radio telescope in Australia to analyse the southern hemisphere.
