SETI@Home Project Ends

For years, volunteers shared idle CPU cycles to analyze interstellar data. Phil Hochmuth, Network World Friday, December 16, 2005

Along with the Howard Stern Show, another radio endeavor involving alien life forms is going off the air this week; SETI@Home, a grid supercomputer project for detecting signs of extra terrestrial life from deep space, officially ended December 15.

"We'll be shutting down the "SETI@home Classic" project on December 15," read an e-mail sent by SETI@Home administrators at the University of California at Berkeley, where the project started in 1999. "The workunit totals of users and teams will be frozen at that point, and the final totals will be available on the Web."

The Search for Extra Terrestrial Life at Home (SETI@Home) project harness idle CPU cycles from millions of Internet-connected PCs across the globe in order to analyze data collected from massive radio telescopes. Running in place of a screensaver, the SETI@Home software, when downloaded on a PC, collected raw data from a centralized SETI@Home server bank and searched for patterns that might signal intelligent life--possible E.T., TV shows, radio communications, or other signals.

Other Applications Although the program ran as a screensaver the collective computing power was enormous; 2 million years of accumulated CPU time, and over 50 terabytes of data, or "workunits," parsed. More than 5 million users have downloaded the software, according to the project organizers.

The project also became a kind of competition for PC hobbyists known as "overclockers" who tweak their systems to run as fast as possible and use SETI@Home workunits to measure system performance and claim bragging rights.

But like the Stern show, SETI@Home will live on in another form. The project is being moved to the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), an open-source grid project using the same principles as the original project. BOINC will continue the search for E.T. radio signals, but a new client also allows users to devote spare CPU power for other research projects, such as climate change, astronomy, and curing human diseases.

Other such researchers have also adopted the SETI@Home approach for research projects that benefit from large amounts of computing power.

BurbankKarl- RE # 57

Yes I just got the eletter from SETI. I honestly thought it was over. No mas, or so I believed.

In any case, I hope that anyone who is not with SETI, will join us over in the "folding" threads and "fold" one for the Gipper!

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1608372/posts

Dear Drango,

SETI@home needs your help. But before we tell you why - and how you can help - Dan and I would like to thank you for your role in the SETI@home success story. We would first like to thank you for your participation in SETI@home. During the first SETI@home project you personally assisted us by searching for extraterrestrial signals in 2274 data chunks and providing 1.256 years of computing time. We want you to know we appreciate your efforts and the efforts of the other 5.4 million volunteers who have donated over 2.4 million years of processing time.

When we started, people thought our projection of 100,000 users to be overly optimistic! You helped us prove that public participation in scientific computing could work. You also helped us to see that this type of community effort deserved to be more common. That's why we developed the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing or BOINC. BOINC has the benefit of allowing our volunteers the option of sharing their processing power with other worthy projects in addition to SETI@home. These projects range from looking for gravitational waves to searching for cures to diseases. But all these successes are just a beginning. If you have not visited the SETI@home website recently, we have successfully transitioned to operating under BOINC. Because of this, new searches are on the horizon for SETI@home.

We are releasing a new version of our processing software that increases the sensitivity of our search by a factor of two or more. We are building and installing a new data recorder at Arecibo. This data recorder operates in conjunction with a newly installed receiver that has the capability to observe seven places on the sky simultaneously. It also increases our sensitivity by another factor of five. These increases in sensitivity mean that SETI@home will have capability of detecting signals that are three times more distant than we could before. The region of space we can search will expand by a factor of thirty. That's thirty times the chance that your computer will detect that faint signal from another star. This increase in capability isn't without cost. Following the "dot com" bust, the commercial support that kept SETI@home running has largely disappeared. Because of this loss of support, we can no longer count on matching funds from the University of California. We are rapidly approaching the end of what funds we do have.

We we will need to raise about $750,000 to pay for these new capabilities and to keep SETI@home operating for the next year. Without this support SETI@home may be forced to shut down. We hope that you will consider making a donation to SETI@home. You can make a secure donation by credit card by clicking this link. Instructions for donation by check or money order are there as well. Unless you specify otherwise, your donation will be noted by a star icon next to your username on the SETI@home pages and your username will appear on our list of donors. If you do not wish to have this recognition you may indicate that as well. Please be assured that regardless of whether or not you choose to have your donation be anonymous, SETI@home will not share your address with other organizations. You can check on our fundraising progress by visiting our main site at http://setiathome.berkeley.edu

Thank You,

Sir Arthur C. Clarke Author and Futurist and Dan Werthimer Chief Scientist, SETI@home

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