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bloo
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Joined: Apr 06, 2003
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 Posted: Mon Feb 04, 2008 1:27 am Post subject: SETI needs you! |
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SETI@home looking for more volunteers
January 2008
BERKELEY – The longest-running search for radio signals from alien civilizations is getting a burst of new data from an upgraded Arecibo telescope, which means the SETI@home project needs more desktop computers to help crunch the data.
Since SETI@home launched eight years ago, the project based at the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory has signed up more than 5 million interested volunteers and boasts the largest community of dedicated users of any Internet computing project: 170,000 devotees on 320,000 computers.
Yet, new and more sensitive receivers on the world's largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, and better frequency coverage are generating 500 times more data for the project than before. The SETI@home software has been upgraded to deal with this new data as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) enters a new era and offers a new opportunity for those who want to help find other civilizations in the universe.
"The next generation SETI@home is 500 times more powerful then anything anyone has done before," said project chief scientist Dan Werthimer. "That means we are 500 times more likely to find ET than with the original SETI@home."
According to project scientist Eric Korpela, the new data amounts to 300 gigabytes per day, or 100 terabytes (100,000 gigabytes) per year, about the amount of data stored in the U.S. Library of Congress. "That's why we need all the volunteers," he said. "Everyone has a chance to be part of the largest public participation science project in history."
The 1,000-foot diameter Arecibo dish, which fills a valley in Puerto Rico, is part of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center operated by Cornell University with funds from the National Science Foundation. Since 1992, Werthimer and his team have piggybacked on radio astronomy observations at Arecibo to record signals from space and analyze them for patterns that could indicate they were transmitted by an intelligent civilization.
When the team's incoming data overwhelmed its ability to analyze it, the scientists conceived a distributed computing project to harness many computers into one big supercomputer to do the analysis. Since SETI@home was launched, other distributed computing projects have arisen, from folding@home to predict the three-dimensional tangle of a protein to the newly-launched cosmology@home to model possible universes. Most are now on a platform called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), which was developed by SETI@home's director David Anderson so that the various projects could share resources.
"There are now 42 projects on BOINC, and, until now, there has been enough computing power to go around," Werthimer said.
What triggered the new flow of data was the addition of seven new receivers at Arecibo, which now allow the telescope to record radio signals from seven regions of the sky simultaneously instead of just one. With greater sensitivity and the ability to detect the polarization of the radio signals, plus 40 times more frequency coverage, Arecibo is set to survey the sky for new radio sources.
These improvements also prime the telescope for an improved search for intelligent signals from space.
"The multiple receivers help us weed out interference better and make us less susceptible to thinking that things terrestrial are extraterrestrial,"
Werthimer said.
Werthimer noted that, despite the fact that UC Berkeley has been analyzing radio signals from space since 1978 on various telescopes, no telltale signals from an intelligent civilization have yet been found.
"Earthlings are just getting started looking at the frequencies in the sky; we're looking only at the cosmically brightest sources, hoping we are scanning the right radio channels," he said. "The good news is, we're entering an era when we will be able to scan billions of channels. Arecibo is now optimized for this kind of search, so if there are signals out there, we or our volunteers will find them."
Further information:
SETI@home Web site |
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dangermite
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Joined: Jun 25, 2006
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Location: Land o´ Lincoln
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| Posted: Mon Feb 04, 2008 4:32 am Post subject: |
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| Oops! I just uninstalled it from my 'puter. Maybe I should put it back on. |
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Xander756
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| Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 3:30 pm Post subject: |
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| Maybe they should fix their crappy software, then. There's a glitch in it that won't let it run on my screen saver, so I can only run it when I'm there or I have to manually turn it on and off every time I leave or start using the computer. It got annoying so I stopped using it. |
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dangermite
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Location: Land o´ Lincoln
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| Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 3:34 pm Post subject: |
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you're using BOINC?
boinc.berkeley.edu
It will be running in the background all the time regardless of whether the screensaver is on or not. It uses whatever remaining processor power there is after the processes you are running in the foreground get their share. |
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Mr_TopSecret00X
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Joined: May 10, 2007
Posts: 276
Location: West Monroe, Louisiana
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| Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2008 11:12 am Post subject: |
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| Any of you who used it, did it bog down your computer. I would like to help out, but not sure if it is safe though. |
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dangermite
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| Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2008 2:02 pm Post subject: |
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| Nah, it didn't really effect performance much. It only runs background jobs that are "niced" all the way down, so anything you run will get priority over their jobs. but, your processor will be running at near 100% all the time, so if your fans are in good shape, it'll overheat. You can limit the maximum CPU to less than 100%, in case overheating is a problem. |
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Mr_TopSecret00X
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Location: West Monroe, Louisiana
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| Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2008 1:51 pm Post subject: |
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| dangermite wrote: |
| Nah, it didn't really effect performance much. It only runs background jobs that are "niced" all the way down, so anything you run will get priority over their jobs. but, your processor will be running at near 100% all the time, so if your fans are in good shape, it'll overheat. You can limit the maximum CPU to less than 100%, in case overheating is a problem. |
I forgot to ask you. Did the program run down your battery quickly or not. Thanks. |
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dangermite
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Joined: Jun 25, 2006
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Location: Land o´ Lincoln
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| Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2008 2:21 pm Post subject: |
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| Ah, good you mentioned that you were using a notebook. I killed a notebook computer by running BOINC on it. Its puny little fan couldn't keep the processor cool enough. BOINC runs just fine on desktops, but I wouldn't recommend running it on a notebook. |
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UnknownX
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| Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2008 11:44 pm Post subject: |
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who still uses screen savers?  |
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Mr_TopSecret00X
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Location: West Monroe, Louisiana
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| Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2008 1:57 pm Post subject: |
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| dangermite wrote: |
| Ah, good you mentioned that you were using a notebook. I killed a notebook computer by running BOINC on it. Its puny little fan couldn't keep the processor cool enough. BOINC runs just fine on desktops, but I wouldn't recommend running it on a notebook. |
I appreciate it. The only problem is I would like to support them, but I dont have a desk top anymore.  |
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Rykuss
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Location: Grand Bay, AL
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| Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2008 1:28 pm Post subject: |
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| I wouldn't mind letting them use my old desktop, if I could get it going again. Hopefully I'll get it going on my days off this week. |
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martiandrifter01
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Location: Xanthe Terra, Sol IV/Mars
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| Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2008 1:20 pm Post subject: |
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SETI@Home had only been up for about 6 mos. I got one (!) chunk of data processed in 6 weeks; the 'puter was a 2-yr-old Pentium 150 and we didn't let it sit idle for hours on end, being a little more energy-conscious than most.
I saw anomalous spikes all over the data, some of them repeated and ALL of them got filtered out by the program. After seeing this, I took the program off the computer in disgust. ET may be out there but SETI isn't really listening very well. Apologies to any SETI members that see this, but it's true: if you filter out all the possible data, there won't be anything left to see! |
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Just for fun, and maybe a chance to learn a little solar system astronomy...
martiandrifter.com |
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dangermite
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| Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2008 2:47 pm Post subject: |
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| supposedly their program is smarter now, looking or sharp peaks, as well as "Gaussian" shaped peaks, and triplets which might indicate a signal. But, I agree without the benefit of a human being looking at the data, there's no way to make sure an interesting signal gets recognized as such. |
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SRO
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| Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 3:25 am Post subject: |
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Yeep. Until we get us some self-aware AI. That'll be the day. I hope I'm still around.
Good luck SETI. But if they find anything we won't know about it. |
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Loner
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Joined: Dec 18, 2001
Posts: 22
Location: Hanscom AFB
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| Posted: Sat May 10, 2008 12:41 pm Post subject: |
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Q - How do you get a SETI Researcher off your front porch?
A - Pay for the Pizza!!
Loner |
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Don't ever count on having both at once.
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