Lewies Blog

I have been participating in the SETI@home project for almost 3 years now. For those of you who may not know, SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Many people download a client application that processes some data and then send it back to the SETI people at Berkeley University of California.

Each portion of data that everyone processes is called a work unit. The data was originally collected from the Arecibo teliscope in Puerto Rico (about 35 GB a day). It is then split up into smaller pieces and distributed to many computers in the SETI program. These work units are processed when the computer is not doing anything else. The data is scanned in many ways by the SETI clients to determine if there are any patterns that the teliscope received from space as a sign of intelligence.

Seti is one of the first pioneers in distributed computing. I am proud to be a part of it. Out of the current 5,430,154 users, I have completed more work units then 99.253% of them according to my SETI statistics. Today I reached a milestone of having processed over 7,500 work units. This brings me up to 40,571st place. I’ve been at this since July 1st of 2002 (just a few days before I got married) and I have 4 computers working away at these work units. I even figured out how to set my Mac up to participate as well.

There are many other distributed programs out there besides SETI. Another popular one is folding@home by Stanford University. They try and understand how proteins fold and how to build there own. Talk about some cool nanotechnology.

Tags: SETI, SETI@home, Aliens, Intelligence, Extraterrestrial, Client, Berkeley, University, California, Arecibo, Teliscope, Puerto Rico, Server, Data, Statistics, Work Unit, CPU, Mac, folding@home, Stanford University, Standford, Berkely University, Nanotechnology

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 31st, 2005 at 11:26 am and is filed under Blogging, Computers, Hobbies, Life, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.