Scientific
Applications:
SCIENTISTS EXTEND GRID PC SEARCH
FOR E.T.
The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Life (SETI) was one of the first large
groups
in the world to harness the power the public's idle home computers using grid
computing. Through the SETI@home project, anyone can donate computing time to
help the group crunch through the massive amounts of data collected by radio-
telescopes, which listen for alien signals sent from outer space. The
computer's owner simply downloads and installs a small piece of software on
their PC, and whenever the machine is turned on and connected to the Internet
but idle, it will use those spare computing cycles to crunch data sent to it
by SETI. The results are sent back to SETI over the Internet automatically,
where they are combined with the small pieces of data worked on by other PCs
all over the world.
Now a second SETI project using massed home-computing power is going to
give
a
second listen to the most promising radio sources it has detected in four
years of work.
Scientists on the SETI@home project will use the giant Arecibo radio
telescope
in Puerto Rico this month to revisit up to 150 spots identified as potential
sources of radio signals broadcast by alien civilizations. SETI stands for
Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.
The signals were from among the literally billions detected since the
search
for extraterrestrial intelligence project began in 1999.
The University of California, Berkeley-based project harnesses the
computing
power of four-million-plus volunteers to scan the data collected at Arecibo.
It is largely sponsored by The Planetary Society.
The collective effort cuts both the cost and time required to sift through
the
extensive data gathered at Arecibo, the world's largest telescope of its
kind.
The dozens of promising signals the effort have turned up were chosen for
several reasons, including the numbers of times they were detected, their
strength and proximity to known stars.
"I give it a one-in-10,000 chance that one of our candidate signals turns
out
to be from ET," project scientist Dan Werthimer, a Berkeley physicist,
said.
The results of the second listen should be available in two to three
months.
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