Everyone knows what SETI is? Right? The movie Contact, if nothing else. No, SETI wasn’t made up for Jodie Foster. It’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. And that big radio telescope antenna in Arecibo isn’t made up either.

SETI has been receiving data from that antenna for a long time now, and receiving data at a very alarming rate. All that data must be processed by computers. The data is processed to look at patterns that may suggest that they were sent by intelligent beings in other star systems.

A couple of years ago someone had a great idea that there are millions of computers out there with far more computing capacity than would ever be needed to do the job. Your PC and mine, all interconnected by the largest distributed network imaginable – the internet.

So that’s what I’m doing right now. My PC has been contributing to that process by analyzing a half megabyte of data from the SETI antenna captured Wednesday, Jan. 13, 1999 at 17:31:49 GMT. There’s a wonderful graphic of the process on my screen giving the progress (also at the end of the article). So far my PC has worked on this data 39 hours, 45 minutes and 50.0 seconds, and it is 71.425% complete.

When it’s done, the data results will be sent back to the originator and set back into a database, and I’ll receive my next chunk. Also, a credit in computer hours will be logged into my account with them. They’ve promised that if I find any sign of extraterrestrial life that I’ll be given some credit for doing all the hard work!

The program runs in two modes; as a screensaver and as a background process. I have an AMD K6-300 that I’m running this on, and it doesn’t seem a burden as I write this. They do warn you, though, to run it as a background process you should have 64MB of memory to limit the page swapping. The screensaver mode needs less memory.

Now I’m not going to upstage these people by giving you all the history. You need to go to the web site and look at all the fascinating information there; but I’ll give you a couple of highlights. There are 355,750 active contributors. There are 910,000 total users, with 80,000 new contributors signed up in the last 15 days. 1E+07 total number of results received...let’s see … that’s 10,000,000, isn’t it? And last, more than 37,000 CPU YEARS contributed so far.

To get set up, you just need to go to the web site, register as a user and download the software. Go to http://www.setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/. Be sure to look at the FAQ there. It answered all my own questions and more. Also, the SETI Institute site is http://www.seti-inst.edu/. There are a number of SETI projects going on. It’s fascinating reading.

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