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You can now participate in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. Finding some on planet Earth is obviously proving impossible so they are looking in space instead. This is done by receiving radio signals from sections of the sky and analysing them for anything that appears artificial. The analysis is done by computers crunching their way through lots of calculations. It would prove horrifically expensive to buy that sort of computing power so someone had a bright idea. There are about 80 million Wintel machines, 30 million Macs, a few million Unix boxes and 2 Amigas still in use around the world. Take a small proportion of those who are internet connected and it leaves a lot of computing power, most of which is idle for a large period of the day. Give these machines a small chunk of data to analyse and have them send in the results when finished. Have the analysis run when the machine is not performing any useful task (like playing Unreal) and a lot of computing power becomes available for negligible cost.

Interested in helping out in the search? Go to http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu for more information and to download the software.

Mac users can use a RAM disk to help speed up processing. Create a RAM disk that will retain data when the system is shutdown. Use ramBunctious or some other shareware product. A 1M RAM disk is adequate. Install the SETI@home client and copy the SETI@home Data folder from the Preferences folder in the system folder to the RAM disk. Make an alias of the SETI@home Data folder on the RAM disk and copy it back to the Preferences folder. Doing this will store the data on the RAM disk and allow the hard disk to spin down if set in the Energy Saver control panel. Change the settings in the SETI@home client to go to a blank screen a short time after the client screensaver is activated. This will improve performance by removing the need to draw all those fancy graphs.

Another tip is to drop down to using thousands of colours rather than millions. I accidentally switched it to the latter and found it took up to 50% longer to process a packet.

 

SETI Packets Processed

 

My current (and very modest) contribution to the project is :

In the top 10%!

 

The discrepancy between the work units sent and received is due to the SETI server not being online when I tried to upload a completed packet. Despite failing it classed the attempt as a valid upload. This does skew the figures slightly but it seems to occur quite frequently with others so I assume the SETI people are aware of it. It does provide a loophole for cheating if you are desperate enough to want to do that sort that thing but I'd rather the software was updated to work correctly.