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University of California-Berkeley

Media Contacts:
Robert Sanders
(510) 643-6998, (510) 642-3734

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 2 January 2008

SETI@home looking for more volunteers
By Robert Sanders, Media Relations

BERKELEY -- The longest-running search for radio signals from alien
civilizations is getting a burst of new data from an upgraded Arecibo
telescope, which means the SETI@home project needs more desktop computers
to help crunch the data.

Since SETI@home launched eight years ago, the project based at the
University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory has signed
up more than 5 million interested volunteers and boasts the largest
community of dedicated users of any Internet computing project: 170,000
devotees on 320,000 computers.

Yet, new and more sensitive receivers on the world's largest radio
telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, and better frequency coverage are
generating 500 times more data for the project than before. The SETI@home
software has been upgraded to deal with this new data as the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) enters a new era and offers a new
opportunity for those who want to help find other civilizations in the
universe.

"The next generation SETI@home is 500 times more powerful then anything
anyone has done before," said project chief scientist Dan Werthimer. "That
means we are 500 times more likely to find ET than with the original
SETI@home."

According to project scientist Eric Korpela, the new data amounts to 300
gigabytes per day, or 100 terabytes (100,000 gigabytes) per year, about
the amount of data stored in the U.S. Library of Congress. "That's why we
need all the volunteers," he said. "Everyone has a chance to be part of
the largest public participation science project in history."

The 1,000-foot diameter Arecibo dish, which fills a valley in Puerto Rico,
is part of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center operated by
Cornell University with funds from the National Science Foundation. Since
1992, Werthimer and his team have piggybacked on radio astronomy
observations at Arecibo to record signals from space and analyze them for
patterns that could indicate they were transmitted by an intelligent
civilization.

When the team's incoming data overwhelmed its ability to analyze it, the
scientists conceived a distributed computing project to harness many
computers into one big supercomputer to do the analysis. Since SETI@home
was launched, other distributed computing projects have arisen, from
folding@home to predict the three-dimensional tangle of a protein to the
newly-launched cosmology@home to model possible universes. Most are now on
a platform called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network
Computing), which was developed by SETI@home's director David Anderson so
that the various projects could share resources.

"There are now 42 projects on BOINC, and, until now, there has been enough
computing power to go around," Werthimer said.

What triggered the new flow of data was the addition of seven new
receivers at Arecibo, which now allow the telescope to record radio
signals from seven regions of the sky simultaneously instead of just one.
With greater sensitivity and the ability to detect the polarization of the
radio signals, plus 40 times more frequency coverage, Arecibo is set to
survey the sky for new radio sources.

These improvements also prime the telescope for an improved search for
intelligent signals from space.

"The multiple receivers help us weed out interference better and make us
less susceptible to thinking that things terrestrial are
extraterrestrial," Werthimer said.

Werthimer noted that, despite the fact that UC Berkeley has been analyzing
radio signals from space since 1978 on various telescopes, no telltale
signals from an intelligent civilization have yet been found.

"Earthlings are just getting started looking at the frequencies in the
sky; we're looking only at the cosmically brightest sources, hoping we are
scanning the right radio channels," he said. "The good news is, we're
entering an era when we will be able to scan billions of channels. Arecibo
is now optimized for this kind of search, so if there are signals out
there, we or our volunteers will find them."

SETI@home has been funded by various organizations over the years,
including the Planetary Society and Sun Microsystems, and continues to be
supported by individual donations from its volunteers.

Further information:

* SETI@home Web site
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/