SETI@home ("SETI at home") is a distributed computing project for Internet-connected home computers, hosted by the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States. SETI is an acronym for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial 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 over five million users worldwide, the project is the most successful example of distributed computing to date.
It performs three main 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
Since its launch on May 17, 1999, the project has logged over two million years of aggregate computing time. On September 26, 2001, SETI@home had performed a total of 1021 floating point operations. It is acknowledged by the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest computation in history. With about 500,000 in the system, SETI@home has, by conservative estimates, the ability to compute 100 TeraFLOPS. While the project has not found any conclusive signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, it has identified several candidate spots for further analysis.
The SETI@home distributed computing software, available for all major operating systems, runs either as a screensaver or continuously while a user works, utilizing otherwise wasted processor power for research. SETI@Home was the first popular distributed computing application. However, some believe now that unused computer cycles could be better spent on projects that have more direct benefits to the human race, such as Folding@home.
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 the Parkes Observatory in Australia to analyse the southern hemisphere. SETI@home is in the process of transferring to a new software platform called Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) that will allow testing for more types of signals as well as let users to contribute to other distributed computing projects running on the BOINC platform.
On September 1, 2004, an interesting signal SHGb02+14a was announced.
Competitive aspect and SETI@Home farms
S@H users quickly started to comptete with one another in an effort to process the maximium number of Work Units. Teams were formed that combined the efforts of individual users. In the US, Ars Technica 'Team Lamb Chop' [1] led the statistics for many years but has recently been overtaken by both SETI.Germany and OcUK- OverClockers UK.
Some users were able to run the application on PCs they had access to at work (an act known as Borging, after the assimilation-driven Borg of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Others simply collected large quantities of equipment togther at home and created "SETI farms" (typically consisting of motherboard, CPU, RAM and PSU only) arranged on shelves as Diskless Workstations running either LINUX or Windows 98se "headless" (without a video card).
As with any competition, numerous attempts have been made to 'cheat' the system and claim credit for work that has not been performed. To combat cheats, the organisers send out each work unit multiple times and only stop sending out the same work unit when they receive back results from two or more different users that exactly agree.
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