Along with the Howard Stern Show, SETI@Home is going off the air this week. The grid supercomputer project for detecting signs of extra terrestrial life from deep space, officially ended Dec. 15th.
“We’ll be shutting down the “SETI@home Classic” project on December 15,” read an e-mail sent by SETI@Home administrators at the University of California at Berkeley, where the project started in 1999. “The workunit totals of users and teams will be frozen at that point, and the final totals will be available on the Web.”
The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence at Home (SETI@Home) project harness idle CPU cycles from millions of Internet-connected PCs across the globe in order to analyze data collected from massive radio telescopes. The SETI@Home screensaver, when downloaded on a PC, collected raw data from a centralized SETI@Home server bank and searched for patterns that might signal intelligent life.
SETI@home, launched in May 1999, looks for regular or strong signals from outer space. It breaks up radio signals from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and sends these to the computers of 5.5 million volunteers, each of which analyses a small chunk of data and sends back the results.
But the project, says director David Anderson, has run out of steam and needs to take a new direction. “The science that SETI@home does is currently a dead end; it was meant to run for two years, it has now run for six. We are just rescanning the sky repeatedly and it’s unlikely that we will find anything we haven’t found before.”
Like the Stern show, SETI@Home will live on.
The project is being moved to the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), an open-source grid project using the same principals as the original project. BOINC will continue the search for E.T. radio signals, but a new client also allows users to devote spare CPU power for other research projects, such as climate change, astronomy and curing human diseases.
Some popular BOINC distributed computing projects now include:
- Climatepredicton.net: study climate change
- Einstein@home: search for gravitational signals emitted by pulsars
- LHC@home: improve the design of the CERN LHC particle accelerator
- Predictor@home: investigate protein-related diseases
- Rosetta@home: help researchers develop cures for human diseases
- SETI@home: Look for radio evidence of extraterrestrial life
- Cell Computing biomedical research (Japanese; requires nonstandard client software)
- World Community Grid: advance our knowledge of human disease. (Requires 5.2.1 or greater)
In other news, Google, Microsoft and Sun are teaming up to donate $7.5 million for a new computer science lab at UC Berkeley to make it easier for Internet entrepreneurs to test their ideas. The Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed systems (RAD Lab) seeks to figure out ways to automate servicing, managing and maintaining large data centers.
And in the next issue of the scientific journal Acta Astronauticav, planet Earth’s computers are wide open to a virus attack from Little Green Men.
Hey.
Maybe something’s up.
ALMA is an international astronomy facility consisting of a giant array of 12-m antennas separated by baselines of up to 18 km and is expected to start partial operation by 2010-2011.
It is a partnership between Europe, North America and Japan, in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. A prototype antenna had already been built by Alcatel Alenia Space and European Industrial Engineering and thoroughly tested along with prototypes antennas from Vertex/LSI and Mitsubishi at the ALMA Antenna Test Facility located at the Very Large Array site in Socorro, New Mexico. Pictures of the invasion are here.
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