SETI@home By Phillip Pride CS 415 Dr. Carl Background Info on - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Oct 23, 2022 117 likes •213 views

SETI@home By Phillip Pride CS 415 Dr. Carl Background Info on SETI Stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals These signals are considered unnatural and

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SETI@home

By Phillip Pride CS 415

Dr. Carl

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Background Info on SETI

Stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
Uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio

signals ○ These signals are considered unnatural and are an indication of extraterrestrial technology

Consist of mainly noise from celestial sources and the

receiver’s electronics and man-made signals (TV stations, radar, and satellites)

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Background Info on SETI cont...

Most SETI programs use large supercomputers that ignore

weak signals and don’t look for a large class of signal types

The computing power necessary to analyze weak signals

exceeds the capabilities of these machines

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Enter SETI@home

In 1995, David Gedye proposes using a virtual supercomputer

composed of large numbers of Internet-connected computers

In May of 1999 SETI@home officially launches at U.C. Berkeley
When it first launched, the creators were only expecting about

1,000 volunteers, but ended up with ~1,000,000 and lacked the server space to accommodate the numbers

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Enter SETI@home cont...

Progress came to a halt until Sun Microsystems donated

computers to help out the program

Over 4 million people have tried the program

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How it works

Data is collected from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico

and recorded on high-density tapes. About one 35 Gbyte DLT tape per day.

Tapes are sent to Berkeley through snail mail
Divided into 0.25 Mbyte chunks (work-units) and sent to

computers

Work units are sent out multiple times to ensure they are

processed correctly

When not in use, your computer uses a screensaver that gets

data from UC Berkeley over the internet, analyzes it, and sends back the results

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How it works cont...

When analyzing the data sent, your computer looks for spikes

in the signal that are considered abnormal

In the case of the Arecibo telescope, this means any signal that

gets louder, then softer over the course of 12 seconds ○ The amount of time it takes for a target to cross the focus

f Arecibo
Your computer will test signals at different to find one with a

possible extraterrestrial source

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Citations

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu