SETI @ home

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
SETI @ home
Area: astronomy
Target: Detecting extraterrestrial signals
Operator: University of Berkeley
Country: United States
Platform: BOINC
Website: setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu
Project status
Status: active
Start: June 26, 2004 (old platform: May 17, 1999)
The End: March 31, 2020

SETI @ home ( S earch for E Xtra T errestrial I ntelligence at home , English for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at home ) is a volunteer computing project of the University of Berkeley , devoted to the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life is concerned.

Project

In contrast to other SETI projects, SETI @ home is a very inexpensive project. In conventional SETI projects, certain promising sections of the sky are specifically searched for radio signals from aliens. Instead, SETI @ home has equipped the radio telescope of the Arecibo Observatory on the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico , which is used for astronomical observations, with an additional receiver and records radio signals while the telescope makes other scientific observations. SETI @ home receives a large amount of radio data without occupying its own telescope time. To evaluate the huge amounts of data, only a little hardware is required; instead, the computing load is outsourced to the PCs of the worldwide SETI @ home community.

Due to the great success of SETI @ home, distributed computing with normal PCs has proven its usability. The total computing power in December 2009 was just under 700 TeraFLOPS . Since 1999, the computers participating in the project have together provided almost 2.3 million years of computing time. During this time, around 1.84 billion results were received from over 5.4 million users (although it must also be said that on average only around 250,000 users are active at any one time, that is, in the last four weeks also a result for the Server). While the project has not yet provided definitive evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, it has identified a number of points in the sky that need further analysis.

SETI @ home has thus become a model for other projects in medical and scientific areas, such as Folding @ home or the Cancer Research Project .

It is also backed by computing power and donations from a wide variety of companies, including Intel and Sun , for example .

On March 2, 2020, the project announced the end of the SETI @ home search for volunteer participants. This was justified on the one hand by the completion of all necessary analyzes, on the other hand by the increasing effort for the administration of the analysis data and the results. The operators refer to the phase as "hibernation", i.e. the resting phase, and have announced that they will continue to put the available resources at the service of science.

The screen saver of the new SETI @ home client with BOINC
Astropulse screensaver

software

SETI @ home distributes two programs: SETI @ home Enhanced and Astropulse .

While SETI @ home Enhanced operates in the narrowband frequency range , Astropulse, on the other hand, looks for broadband pulses of short duration. There are three main tests that are performed on the data:

  • Look for Gaussian rises and falls in transmit power that could possibly indicate a radio source.
  • Look for pulses that could be a narrowband digital-like transmission
  • Search for triples, i.e. three pulses in a row

SETI @ home with BOINC

SETI @ home was on 22 June 2004 to the new software - platform BOINC changed. The BOINC developed by the SETI @ home team represents a general platform for various applications for distributed computing . The conversion is intended to create a basis for flexible expansion of the SETI @ home project. The old “classic” client , for example, was limited to only being able to analyze data with a 2- bit scanning depth from the recording device on the Arecibo telescope . For the future it is planned to evaluate data with better resolution and from the Parkes telescope in the southern hemisphere in Australia . This future project was christened SETI @ home II . The BOINC client can be expanded with new search algorithms or data formats relatively easily by loading a new program version from the SETI @ home server fully automatically .

The user can choose on his profile page whether he wants to use SETI @ home Enhanced or Astropulse or both applications. The calculation of an Astropulse work unit currently requires a multiple of the time that is required for a SETI @ home enhanced work unit.

The platforms supported for SETI @ home Enhanced are currently Windows ( x86 ), Linux (x86 and x86-64 ), macOS from 10.3 and on Intel CPUs Solaris ( SPARC ). Only Windows (x86), Linux (x86 and x86-64) and OSX are currently supported for Astropulse. There are also some unofficial applications for other platforms that are not supported by the SETI @ home team.

GPGPU

Since December 17, 2008, the CUDA technology from graphics chip manufacturer Nvidia has been supported. This makes it possible to use not only the unused computing power of the CPU , but also that of the GPU , which leads to a significantly accelerated completion of the work units. A CUDA-capable graphics card with at least 256 MB graphics memory , a current CUDA-supporting driver for the graphics card and a BOINC version 6.4.5 or higher is required to use the GPU computing power  . Currently, only SETI @ home-enhanced applications and no Astropulse applications are issued for CUDA. At the moment (Feb. 2009) there are CUDA applications only for x86 Windows. An application for Apple Macintosh is available from MAC OS X version 10.4.0. More recently, both AMD Radeon graphics cards and the iGPU of the Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs can be used for computing work units. Since the Nvidia-exclusive CUDA technology is naturally not available, the OpenCL interface is used. A 64-bit version Windows 7 or Windows 8 and the current BOINC client (version 7.0.28 or later), also as a 64-bit version, are required. Difficulties often arise due to the driver selection. For example, when using the more recent AMD drivers for the Radeon graphics cards, the use of the GPU for BOINC cannot be activated. Currently (as of April 25, 2013) driver version 12.11 is optimal for the workunit calculation under BOINC with Radeon graphics cards. The performance gain is considerable: A graphics card calculates a work unit in less than a third of the time than a CPU from a comparable price segment.

history

  • On May 17, 1999, the project was officially approved for downloading the first client programs.
  • On June 22nd, 2004 the platform was switched to BOINC.
  • On December 15, 2005, the SETI @ home Classic project was officially discontinued. Since then, SETI @ home has only been calculated within BOINC. The calculation results (including the number of calculated work units) of the old SETI Classic application were frozen at this time and can still be viewed on the official website today.
  • On July 25, 2008, the Astropulse application was added.
  • CUDA has been supported since December 17th, 2008 and graphics chips with CUDA versions older than 2.0 have also been supported since January 21st, 2009.
  • In mid-May 2011, a receiver was put into operation at the Green Bank Telescope of the Green Bank Observatory .
  • On March 2, 2020, the project announced that it would stop sending work packages at the end of the month and pause the project.

Origin of name

The addition @home (English for at home ) refers to the fact that anyone who has a PC and an Internet connection, can at home to contribute to this project by installing a freely available program that data from a radio telescope downloads and analyzed. The program runs either as a screen saver or completely in the background as a daemon . In both cases, only computing power is used that would otherwise have remained unused.

Optimized applications

There are a number of so-called optimized applications , for example, in addition, the SSE - or SSE3 - instruction sets use of processors for calculating the work units can be performed much faster whereby the calculations. These applications are not produced by SETI @ home and are not officially supported by them. However, parts of this source code have been incorporated into the official application.

further reading

  • E. Korpela, D. Werthimer, D. Anderson, J. Cobb, M. Lebofsky et al .: SETI @ home, Massively Distributed Computing for SETI . 1998
  • S. Bowyer et al .: Twenty Years of SERENDIP, the Berkeley SETI Effort: Past Results and Future Plans . Astronomical and Biochemical Origins and the Search for Life in the Universe, CB Cosmovici, S. Bowyer, and D. Werthimer, eds., IAU Colloquium No. 161 (Editrice Compositori: Bologna), p. 667, 1996.
  • D. Anderson et al .: Internet Computing for SETI . in Bioastronomy 99: A New Era in Bioastronomy G. Lemarchand and K. Meech, eds., ASP Conference Series No. 213 ( Astronomical Society of the Pacific : San Francisco), pp. 511, 2000.
  • Eric J. Korpela, et al .: Candidate Identification and Interference Removal in SETI @ home. PDF @arxiv, accessed September 13, 2011

See also

Web links

Commons : SETI @ home  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
 Wikinews: Computer theft solved thanks to BOINC  - message
  • SETI @ home - official project website (partly in English)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c SETI @ home hibernation. March 2, 2020, accessed March 3, 2020 .
  2. ↑ http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/cuda.php
  3. ↑ http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/GPU_computing
  4. ↑ UC Berkeley SETI survey focuses on Kepler's top Earth-like planets
  5. ↑ German-language help for optimized applications ; As of June 28, 2013