The SETI@Home project never did find any evidence of alien life, but it still leaves behind an important legacy as one of the first and most successful examples of distributed computing. Initially, the project intended to try to reach up to 100,000 home computer users, but it was far more widely used than was originally imagined.
Full Answer
Why choose Seti?
Seti has proven itself capable of sustaining the interest of hundreds of thousands of people.
What is a SETI farm?
Other users collect large quantities of equipment together at home to create "SETI farms", which typically consist of a number of computers consisting of only a motherboard, CPU, RAM and power supply that are arranged on shelves as diskless workstations running either Linux or old versions of Microsoft Windows "headless" (without a monitor).
What happened to SETI@home?
In a December 16, 2007 plea for donations, SETI@home stated its present modest state and urged donations of $476,000 needed for continuation into 2008. A number of individuals and companies made unofficial changes to the distributed part of the software to try to produce faster results, but this compromised the integrity of all the results.
When was the first version of Seti released?
Developer (s) University of California, Berkeley Initial release May 17, 1999 ( 1999-05-17) Stable release SETI@home v8：8.00 / December 30, 2015; 5 ... Development status Online Project goal (s) Discovery of radio evidence of extraterr ... 10 more rows ...
What is SETI at home?
SETI@home ("SETI at home") is an Internet-based public volunteer computing project employing the BOINC software platform created by the Berkeley SETI Research Center and is hosted by the Space Sciences Laboratory, at the University of California, Berkeley. Its purpose is to analyze radio signals, searching for signs of extraterrestrial ...
When did SETI start?
The initial software platform, now referred to as "SETI@home Classic," ran from May 17, 1999, to December 15, 2005.
How many computers did SETI at home use?
The original intent of SETI@home was to utilize 50,000–100,000 home computers. Since its launch on May 17, 1999, the project has logged over two million years of aggregate computing time. On September 26, 2001, SETI@home had performed a total of 10 21 floating point operations.
Why was SETI@home fired?
In one documented case, an individual was fired for explicitly importing and using the SETI@home software on computers used for the U.S. state of Ohio. In another incident a school IT director resigned after his installation allegedly cost his school district $1 million in removal costs; however, other reasons for this firing included lack of communication with his superiors, not installing firewall software and alleged theft of computer equipment, leading a ZDNet editor to comment that "the distributed computing nonsense was simply the best and most obvious excuse the district had to terminate his contract with cause ".
When did SETI stop sending out new work?
In March 2020 , the project stopped sending out new work to SETI@home users, bringing the crowdsourced computing aspect of the project to an indefinite hiatus. At the time, the team intended to shift focus onto the analysis and interpretation of the 20 years' worth of accumulated data.
When was SETI@home released?
SETI@home was released to the public on May 17, 1999, making it the third large-scale use of distributed computing over the Internet for research purposes, after Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) was launched in 1996 and distributed.net in 1997.
Is SETI funded by the government?
There is currently no government funding for SETI research, and private funding is always limited. Berkeley Space Science Lab has found ways of working with small budgets, and the project has received donations allowing it to go well beyond its original planned duration, but it still has to compete for limited funds with other SETI projects and other space sciences projects.
Where did SETI originate?
In the decades that followed, they turned to supercomputers. And then, they came for your CPUs. The idea for SETI@Home originated at a cocktail party in Seattle, when computer scientist David Gedye asked a friend what it might take to excite the public about science.
What is the hardest part about SETI?
But the hardest part about SETI is that scientists don’t know where ET may live, or how ET’s civilization might choose to communicate. And so they have to look for a rainbow of possible missives from other solar systems, all of which move and spin at their own special-snowflake speeds through the universe.
Who dreamed up the idea of volunteer computing?
Gedye dreamed up the idea of “volunteer computing,” in which people gave up their hard drives for the greater good when those drives were idle, much like people give up their idle cars, for periods of time, to Turo (if Turo didn’t make money and also served the greater good).
Was Gedye a SETI guy?
But Gedye wasn’t a SETI guy —he was a computer guy—so he didn’t know if or how a citizen-computing project would work. He got in touch with astronomer Woody Sullivan, who worked at the University of Washington in Seattle. Sullivan turned him over to Werthimer. And Gedye looped in Anderson. They had a quorum, of sorts.
Overview
SETI@home ("SETI at home") is a project of the Berkeley SETI Research Center to analyze radio signals, searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Until March 2020, it was run as an Internet-based public volunteer computing project that employed the BOINC software platform. It is hosted by the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, and is one of many activities undertaken as part of the worldwide SETI effort.
Scientific research
The two original goals of SETI@home were:
• to do useful scientific work by supporting an observational analysis to detect intelligent life outside Earth
• to prove the viability and practicality of the "volunteer computing" concept
The second of these goals is considered to have succeeded completely. The current BOINC environment, a devel…
Procedure details
SETI@home searches for possible evidence of radio transmissions from extraterrestrial intelligence using observational data from the Arecibo radio telescope and the Green Bank Telescope. The data is taken "piggyback" or "passively" while the telescope is used for other scientific programs. The data is digitized, stored, and sent to the SETI@home facility. The data are then parsed into small chunks in frequency and time, and analyzed, using software, to search for any signals—that is, variations which cannot be ascribed to noise, and hence contain info…
Results
To date, the project has not confirmed the detection of any ETI signals. However, it has identified several candidate targets (sky positions), where the spike in intensity is not easily explained as noisespots, for further analysis. The most significant candidate signal to date was announced on September 1, 2004, named Radio source SHGb02+14a.
While the project has not reached the stated primary goal of finding extraterrestrial intelligence, it has proved to t…
Technology
Anybody with an at least intermittently Internet-connected computer was able to participate in SETI@home by running a free program that downloaded and analyzed radio telescope data.
Observational data were recorded on 2-terabyte SATA hard disk drives fed from the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico, each holding about 2.5 days of observations, which were then sent to Berkeley. Arecibo does not have a broadband Internet connection, so data must go by postal mail to …
Statistics
With over 5.2 million participants worldwide, the project was the distributed computing project with the most participants to date . The original intent of SETI@home was to utilize 50,000–100,000 home computers. Since its launch on May 17, 1999, the project has logged over two million years of aggregate computing time. On September 26, 2001, SETI@home had performed a total of 10 floating point operations. It was acknowledged by the 2008 edition of the Guinness World Records as the largest computation in history. With over 145,000 active c…
Project future
There were plans to get data from the Parkes Observatory in Australia to analyze the southern hemisphere. However, as of 3 June 2018 , these plans were not mentioned in the project's website. Other plans include a Multi-Beam Data Recorder, a Near Time Persistency Checker and Astropulse (an application that uses coherent dedispersion to search for pulsed signals). Astropulse will team with the original SETI@home to detect other sources, such as rapidly rotating pulsars, exploding primordial black holes, or as-yet unknown astrophysical phe…
Competitive aspect
SETI@home users quickly started to compete with one another to process the maximum number of work units. Teams were formed to combine the efforts of individual users. The competition continued and grew larger with the introduction of BOINC.
As with any competition, attempts have been made to "cheat" the system and claim credit for work that has not been performed. To combat cheats, the SETI@home system sends every work unit to multiple computers, a valu…