Three Wise Men

Few days ago project SETI@home celebrated its 10th anniversary. I can’t believe that it has been so long. We were recording signals from outer space for a bit longer time, but past ten years some of those signals have been properly analyzed and listened to. Looking for aliens extra terrestrial life, great, lovely and fascinating. I guess. Let’s take a look at what SETI@home accomplished in ten years. But first, we have too get a little more knowledge about how SETI@home works.

Arecibo Observatory is always listening to that part of the sky where it is located and while it’s operating data is being recorded. This data has to be split in smaller units which are then analyzed by SETI@home clients. Telescope records a certain number of workunit groups on each day. Those groups are then split into 256 units by frequency. Each unit is 107 seconds long and units time overlaps for about 20 seconds. Workunit database wasn’t updated for some time now, but on August 2008 there were 1840943 workunit groups recorded and made available to SETI@home clients all over the world.

When client is activated it connects to SETI server, downloads a workunit and starts analyzing it. When analysis is complete it sends results back to SETI server and downloads another package. And so on and so on. Well, Arecibo telescope wasn’t available all the time to SETI group and over the years they’ve been getting less and less data to analyze and data was recorded only for 1446 days (on August 2008). SETI@home has also become a platform for some other studies that rely on computing power.

Over past ten years SETI2home had over 5 million clients all of them aggregated for more than 2 million years of computing time. Currently with more than 300.000 computers in the network SETI@home can compute at 528 TFLOPS beating IBM‘s Blue Gene sustained performance at 478 TFLOPS.

Congratulations to SETI@home project, they proved that distributed computing on a large scale actually works and this was the biggest computational task in human history. Until now they performed more than 10²¹ floating point operations. But the biggest achievement by far is a number of people out there that have the same screen saver for the past ten years.

That is an astonishing accomplishment!

Related articles by Zemanta

• UFOs – Do You Believe? (lockergnome.com)
• Alien Census: Can We Estimate How Much Life Is Out There? (sciam.com)
• Because Faith Trumps Science: (brothersjuddblog.com)
• Life on other planets? You bet, says SETI pioneer (seattlepi.com)
• First (human) tweet from Outer Space! (thenextweb.com)