Is the truth out there?
by Brett White <[email protected]>
Steven Speilberg created that most famous alien with the glowing
finger who has imortalised the words "ET...phone home", but now things
have changed. Berkeley University suspects that ET was returning a
call from a rather angry father wanting to know where his band new
inter-stellar space craft is and why he was out past his curfew. So
now the search has begun for calls being placed by other disgruntled
alien parents using the SETI@home project.
SETI@home is a distributed computing effort run by Berkeley
University to help in the Search for Extra
Terestrial Intelligence At Home / School /
Work or any supported system you can sneak it on to without your boss
catching you. >:) Data is recorded from the Arecibo radio telescope
in Puerto Rico (around 35Gb per day) and sent via snail-mail to
Berkeley where it is split up into 0.25Mb chunks refered to a
"work-units".
The SETI@home client program downloads these work-units from the
SETI@home server and proceeds to perform intensive calculations on the
data to search for radio signals that could have originated from
another planet. Once these calculations are complete the work-unit
results are sent back where they are checked
for possible 'favorable' results. If a favorable result is found then
the SETI@home server will re-analyse the work-unit to check for the
validity of the result. But that's enough of the semi-gory details
for now (if you want more of the gory details including exactly how it
works please check out the Links section at the
end of this document.
As of 02/02/2000, SETI@home has 1,673,821 users registered and who
have processed 67,982,028 work-units for a total CPU time of 174115.40
years. This averages out to about 22.5 hours per work unit. But don't
let that lengthy time per unit discourage you. Most of the work-units
have been completed on Windows 95 which has an average of 29.25 hours
as compared to FreeBSD's average of around 16 hours. The reason for
this is that the Windows version attempts to keep it's users happy by
displaying a lot of graphical status information during processing
whereas, up until version 2.0 of the client, all Unix clients were
purely text based (as of 2.0 there is the option of running SETI@home
with an X interface to display similar graphs).
All seem too much to handle alone?
Don't worry, the SETI project allows you to create or sign up to
current groups to whom your work-units and time will be contributed
(while still keeping a personal record as well). VicFUG User Group
currently has a team that has 6 members and we have completed a total
of 1383 work-units. But check out the list of thousands of work,
school and club groups that are registered to get a better feel for
the kind of people who contribute to the effort.
So how do you join? Well you can download the latest SETI@home
client from http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu for your platform and
install it. When you first run it you will be asked to provide some
details (name, email address) to create an account and then you will
be provided with your first work unit. Once you have your accont
created you can then go to the SETI site and sign up to any of the
groups by following the "Groups" link.
Well, that's about it, but as a final word, if you want to join a
group you might like to consider VicFUG's,
although there are a number of FreeBSD groups out there..
Current Platform rankings
Platform |
Work Units |
CPU Time |
1) Windows 95 |
18065211 |
60325.34 yr 29 hr 15 min 08.5 sec |
5) solaris2.6 |
3325140 |
6200.53 yr 16 hr 20 min 06.5 sec |
6) linux-gnu |
2831496 |
4589.38 yr 14 hr 11 min 54.6 sec |
18) freebsd3.2 |
217926 |
413.09 yr 16 hr 36 min 18.4 sec |
22) freebsd3.1 |
142596 |
263.05 yr 16 hr 09 min 35.2 sec |
24) freebsd2.2.8 |
99304 |
187.73 yr 16 hr 33 min 36.9 sec |
35) freebsd4.0 |
15607 |
28.42 yr 15 hr 57 min 10.3 sec |
36) freebsd2.2.7 |
15410 |
30.61 yr 17 hr 24 min 01.1 sec |
38) freebsd2.2.6 |
11588 |
25.66 yr 19 hr 24 min 02.1 sec |
46) freebsd3.3 |
3377 |
5.47 yr 14 hr 10 min 37.8 sec |
SETI at Home
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu
VicFUG User Group Team
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/stats/team/team_46987.html
VicFUG User Group
http://www.vicfug.au.freebsd.org
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