| What is Seti ?Seti is an acronym which stands for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intellegence .In clear it involves analyzing the data received from large radio-stations, like the Aricebo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico. Such telescopes receive about 35GB of data every day. The data needs to be examined in order to find out whether there is some intresting signal hiding in that data. The computing pouwer required to examine the data at a reasonable rate is enormous. Most SETI projects build or buy supercomputers that analyzing the data in real time. Unfortunately, even the fastest computer on earth isn't capable of analyzing the data thoroughly enough, so lots of data ( maybe useful data ) are just lost . The cost of building a supercomputer are enormous, abviously more tha a SETI team can afford. Therefore most teams use slouwer computers, but these computers are also slouwer at examining the data. Going further down this pad, we could also use many smaller computers to do the job. That is wath SetiI@Home is doing, it use the computing power from aneone wha wants to give away some of their ( otherwise wased ) computing power to the SETI. The Seti@Home client works like a screen-saver, when you are not using your computer the client, the client becomes actieve and when you decide to use it again, the client goes to sleep. Seti@Home requires a client which you can download here and it connects automatically to the Seti@Home severs to obtain a block of data to analyze. Once the client has downloaded the block your computer examines it, and sends back the results to the Seti@Home severs and gets a new block. |
