SETI@home looking for more volunteers (Forwarded)

Media Relations
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/