My personal milestone in the search for Extraterrestrials
Have you heard of SETI? It's an abbreviation for the "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence." It was covered in the book and the movie "Contact" staring Jodie Foster. But unlike the way the movie made it look like people sit around listening with headphones, the real search takes place by analyzing the radio signals with computers.
The problem is the enormous volume of data to examine and the wide range of possible signals that we MIGHT receive. It takes a LOT of processing power. That WOULD be expensive, even now super computers are still pricey to purchase and operate. But what the clever scientists thought up was a way to let millions of ordinary people perform a tiny part of the work and then gather up the results. The system they invented is called SETI@home.
It's brilliant. You install a little program or a screen saver and it runs on your computer when you're not using it for something else. It downloads little packages of data from SETI (70 seconds worth of data gathered from the mighty Arecebo Radio Telescope) and spends hours or possibly days analyzing it for potential patterns. I've been running this program, on and off, for years now. And that brings me to the topic for today's "thought." I recently reached a milestone and that is the processing of 500 units of data. I have run the program on several different computers, but the server in Berkeley keeps up with my total effort. These 500 units represent over 1.1 years of cpu time!!
That 1.1 years of computer time took a LOT more than 1.1 years. I started just running the screen-saver on my workstation. "Back-in-the-day" computers weren't as powerful and it took weeks to process a single unit. I had completed about 65 units when I changed jobs and just didn't remember to set it up again.
Then, years later, I got a follow-up e-mail from them thanking me for my contribution and it reminded me to start again. I had an extra computer that I leave running continously as the "house" webserver and when it's not busy with my tasks, it constantly crunches SETI packets. It can usually handle a packet every day or two. Plus, I have an even faster workstation that doesn't stay on all the time, but when it's on, it's running SETI@home and it can crunch a unit in under 8 hours!
So, anyway, here I am. Finally past the 500 unit mark. That puts me in the top tenth of the people who run SETI@home. In fact, according to their statistics, I have completed more work units than 92.733% of their users! Not bad, but before you start patting me on the back know this, to date 4.8 million users have donated 1.7 Million Years of CPU time! Well, I don't let that get me down, I'm not really in competition with any of them, it's a team effort. Not one that has revealed any E.T.'s (yet) but hey, we're just getting started and my computer wasn't doing anything better anyway.