WVSU Yellow Jacket — Find space aliens in your computer's spare time
By Sean Rose
There are many opinions and so-called facts concerning the existence of life on planets other than our own. Only one thing is certain, we are looking and you can help.
The program is called SETI (The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence), and it is a 40+ year-old program designed to use radio telescopes scattered around the globe to search the 400 billion stars of the Milky Way for signs of intelligent life.
The basis of the program is to beam out radio signals (microwaves to be exact) showing that Earth is an intelligent civilization and to listen hoping that some other intelligent life is doing the same somewhere else.
The problem lies in the analysis of the data recorded by the radio dishes. Forty-year-old computers aren’t exactly powerful by today’s standards and the whole sky is a great big place. It wasn’t until the advent of the Internet that a marvelous transformation in SETI took place. The massive amounts of data, some 35 giga-bytes a day from one dish, would be chopped up and sent to client computers across the Internet and processed as a screen-saver on everyday personal computers. SETI@home is born.
The SETI@home software makes a very pretty screen saver display and only works when you are not using your computer so it does not interfere with your work. Plus, if you happen to be the lucky one to discover a repeating radio message and hence maybe alien life, you get co-discovery credit. That means your name will be in human history books from now on.
The combined power of all these Internet connected personal computers has made the SETI@home project the most powerful computing environment ever. For less than $500,000 dollars the program has surpassed the world’s most powerful computer, a $110 million dollar IBM supercomputer, processing almost 1.5 times the information the IBM machine is capable of.
The software is available for all major personal computer operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS, BeOS, UNIX and Linux and can be run on an old 386 all the way up to today’s fastest processors.
Download the SETI@home software at http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu and help find aliens in your computer’s spare time.
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