Posted on 12/17/2005 3:58:48 PM PST by Vermonter
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.
Nutten out there folks.
Are they done, or have they given up?
What's in the article is all I know
they're switching all the brain power over to the global warming data crunching...
Interesting... Why can't they let us choose which project gets our extra processing cycles? It seems only fair.
And why the hell are they sharing column space with Howard Stern?
Might be able to pick up some extra CPUs!
"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."
The protein folding program is probably the most beneficial for humanity.
As Hank said, the project itself lives on as a part of BOINC.
You're serious. Well, there is a lot of uncrunched data. They need some kind of thesis, though, or they'll just end up with more data.
I believe it's because aliens have heard.....
to generate media, aka you put howard stern in and people are suppose to oohh and ahh... becuase he's a marketing genious...
thats the whoopla behind that
so thats the real question, why did they use his name since, noone but the howy heads cares...
my2c worth
So now we can all BOINC for extra-terrestrial life? Hmmm...
Of course there is. Too bad some still see earth as the center of the universe.
Naw, if there was sumpten you would have heard from them by now. ..... Naw, nutten out there...
There is more astronomical data coming in every day than can be processed in months, and they can process and reprocess the same data over and over whenever they want to look for a specific feature. This ought to be done on a much bigger scale, and it shouldn't depend on whether the grad dept gets some funding.
I had a PC in this project since 2000. Last year I found that there was a Freeper group in SETI@Home and moved my acct to that group. Oddly enough I stopped running SETI on my PC recently for the first time in ages and now they are folding.
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