We must... find... before too... late...
SETI@Home is the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence at home. What basically happens is they (the dudes at Berkely) have a radio-telescope scanning the sky at a 24/24 basiscollecting data. Now they would need a huge beast of a computer to analyze all this data, and fact is... There's no single computer capable of doing this job, and even if there was, they certainly don't have it. So the gathered data would just sit there for centuries untill their computer can analyze all of it...
Well, this is where we come in. The Internet is full of computers "twiddling their thumbs"... How many computers aren't out there, connected to the Internet, that just sit there idling all the time? Millions! Now if each of those computers could contribute a bit to analyzing this data, that would be cool, right? Well, the wizzkids at Berkely thought of this too, and so they decided to play it smart. They chopped the data into little fragments, called "work units". They also created a program that can retreive such a work unit from the net, analyze it, and send the results back to Berkely. In order not to disturb the owner of the PC where the analyzer runs, they've constructed this program in such a way that it only starts when a the computer hasn't been used for a few minutes, just like a screensaver. Well, in fact, it even looks like a screensaver. Well, on Windoze at least; in linux it's just a process that constantly runs in the background, in a "nice" way. This means it doesn't take a lot or CPU-time off from the other processes that are running, but it just fills up the gaps in time when the CPU isn't doing anything. For example, if a CPU would normally be used for 25%, the other 75% of the time go into analyzing the seti-data.
Now, thankx to all of us people contributing to this project, they have found a way of analyzing all of this data in a reasonable time, without having to spend billions in hiring/buying computers/computer time from third parties. Thanks to us, all the data gets analyzed in a quick and cheap way. And who knows... Perhaps we actually might find something... Now if ET tries to phone back, there's actually someone to pick up. ;)
Anyway, believers or non-believers, I leave that in the middle. We just donate our computer-time out of solidarity. It doesn't cost us anything. Well, ok... We do need to leave our computers on, and we do need to connect to the Internet every now and then, but both electricity and Internet connection are free where we stay. And if your computer is switched on most of the time, and you have an internet connection, it wouldn't cost you much either. So why not contribute to this great project?
If you're looking for more info on the project, just surf to their homepage and perhaps download the program.
As from now I'm also doing some beta-testing for ProcessTree Network TM so Seti will have to do with only one of my 2 processors in my little dual celeron box. Also, the rest of the group (except me and wOOsie) deserted the project:
- Skotty and Garath just wanted to race each other to the 350th packet; Garath won. Nowadays they spend their days racing each other to the 350th beer in a beer-drinking contest, the 350th place in the league of most ugly men ever to walk on the face of mother Earth, the 350th extinction by double-barreled bazooka of endangered species and their 350th year in college (Skotty is leading by one).
- Levvie has a PC that isn't really suitable for the job (too low on memory) and decided to give up untill he has a better box. In the meantime he sheduled his box for calculating the answer to another problem: the answer to the great question of Life, the Universe and Everything. Well, basically he just wrote a perl-script that sleeps for seven and a half million years, then returns "42".
- DrNOOoo never really seemed to care about the project, and stopped after 49 packets. Strangely enough that is also the 2064th power of the first random number I ever got out of my old 386, which still is considered my most favourite number in my 24*86 matrix of favourite numbers. And to top it off, it's positioned on the coordinates [12, 61] in that same matrix. Now divide 2064 by 49 and you get... nearly 42! Something for all you kabalists out there to think about...
- Dukath usually forgets to turn his seti client on, and is believed to have given up on the project alltogether. He is also believed to be an extraterrestrial from Mormidon 7 on a mission to infiltrate our security agencies in order to gain as much information on us as possible and to prepare our race for first contact with his species, but when asked about it he usually laughs it away saying "Geez man, aren't you the paranoid one?" while eating away at his plate of ionized mint-flavoured methane-jelly.
ProcessTree NetworkTM
For-pay Internet distributed processing.
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