ACM TechNews

SETI@home Looking for More Volunteers

University of California, Berkeley (01/02/08) Sanders, Robert

The University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory is receiving a burst of new data from an upgraded Arecibo telescope, meaning the SETI@home project needs more desktop computers to help process the data. SETI@home, which launched eight years ago, has signed up more than 5 million volunteers, including 170,000 devotees on 320,000 computers. The new, more sensitive receivers on the world's largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, are generating 500 times more data for the project than before. The new sensors are capable of scanning several regions of the sky at the same time, instead of just one, and have a greater sensitivity and are able to detect the polarization of radio signals. The SETI@home software has been upgraded to manage the new data as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) enters a new era. "The next generation SETI@home is 500 times more powerful then anything anyone has done before," says project chief scientist Dan Werthimer. "That means we are 500 times more likely to find ET than with the original SETI@home." Project scientist Eric Korpela says the new data equals 300 gigabytes per day, or 100,000 terabytes per year, approximately equal to all of the information stored in the U.S. Library of Congress. Various other distributed computing projects have launched since SETI, including folding@home and cosmology@home. Most projects are on Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BIONC), which was developed by SETI@home's director David Anderson so the various projects could share resources.

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2008/01/02_setiahome.shtml

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