I downloaded the SETI@home program a few days ago and I think it's pretty cool.
For those who don't know what SETI@home is here's how it works,
the Arecibo radio telescope in Costa Rica scans the skies and receives about 28 million frequencies at once looking for signals (like stars, pulsars, quasars, novas, ET's...ect).
Arecibo sends the raw data to the University of California for anlysis. But theres a problem, there is so much data that it would take a supercomputer larger then any ever built to process the data in any sort of a timely manner.What to do?
to make data processing faster and easier UC Berkeley developed the SETI@home program which uses YOUR computer to process the data. This is done by breaking the data down into small portions called work units which are about 0.25 MB in size, these work units are sent to the SETI@home volunteers' PCs which work on anylizing the signal data while the computer is idle. When the computer is done it sends the data to UC, UC in turn sends your computer a new work unit.
Right now there are over 2.5 million SETI@home volunteers in the US alone and about 4 million in other countries. Together the combined computing power is enough to process the huge amount of data coming from the telescope. But they could always use more to speed up the process.
So now that you newcomers know about SETI@home, does anyone else here have it?
For those who don't know what SETI@home is here's how it works,
the Arecibo radio telescope in Costa Rica scans the skies and receives about 28 million frequencies at once looking for signals (like stars, pulsars, quasars, novas, ET's...ect).
Arecibo sends the raw data to the University of California for anlysis. But theres a problem, there is so much data that it would take a supercomputer larger then any ever built to process the data in any sort of a timely manner.What to do?
to make data processing faster and easier UC Berkeley developed the SETI@home program which uses YOUR computer to process the data. This is done by breaking the data down into small portions called work units which are about 0.25 MB in size, these work units are sent to the SETI@home volunteers' PCs which work on anylizing the signal data while the computer is idle. When the computer is done it sends the data to UC, UC in turn sends your computer a new work unit.
Right now there are over 2.5 million SETI@home volunteers in the US alone and about 4 million in other countries. Together the combined computing power is enough to process the huge amount of data coming from the telescope. But they could always use more to speed up the process.
So now that you newcomers know about SETI@home, does anyone else here have it?