SETI@home needs help scanning data

 

Gallery

By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 4 Jan 2008 at 11:02

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project is calling for more volunteers to join its distributed computing project, as collected data begins to exceed available computing power.

The project already has 170,000 regular volunteers using 320,000 computers to analyse data for extraterrestrial signals, but the improvements to the receivers on the Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico have increased the width of frequencies it's scanning, bringing in far more data.

"The next generation SETI@home is 500 times more powerful then anything anyone has done before. That means we are 500 times more likely to find ET than with the original SETI@home," says project chief scientist Dan Werthimer.

The SETI@home project was one of the first wide-scale distributed computing projects, and gave birth to the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform on which many other projects such as Proteins@home, Einstein@home and ABC@home have been founded.

"There are now 42 projects on BOINC, and, until now, there has been enough computing power to go around," says Werthimer.

SETI@home has been running since 1999, but has so far found nothing to indicate the presence of intelligent extraterrestrials, but the project leaders remain optimistic.

"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. 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," says Werthimer.

We're out in Las Vegas this week bringing you the latest technology news from CES 2008, have a look at our coverage on our CES minisite.