🚀 go-pugleaf

If you never dreamed of being an astronomer please move on.  For those
that have, continue reading.

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has a fairly new project
called SETI@Home.  They are collecting radio telescope data at the Arecibo
Observatory in South America (Peru ?).  This data (35 GB a day) is written
to tape and sent to Berkeley.  From there it is divided into 256KB chunks
and sent out over the internet to people like myself who have volunteered
our computer downtime to crunch the data.  What you get is a data analysis
program that runs like a screen saver (i.e. only when you are not using
your computer).  It takes the data and does _a lot_ of searching for
narrow bandwidth signals.  When I say a lot that means that a really fast
computer will complete a data set in 15 hours of CPU time.  My Pentium 200
MMX with 32 MB of RAM is processing at about 2% of a data set an hour, or
50 hours of CPU time for one data set!  With 140,000 data sets a day you
can see why SETI is looking for extra processing time.  Once done with a
data set the results are sent back to Berkeley via the internet and a new
data set is downloaded.  Who knows, you just might be the one to discover
ET Intelligence.

If you are still interested, go to http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu to
download the program.  They have versions to run on PC and Mac platforms
as well as several UNIX flavors including _Linux_!  The program is really
easy to setup and run.  

Besides tracking individual statistics, including listing you on their
website if you find anything interesting, they also track combined group
efforts.   I couldn't find a CSU or Fort Collins group, so I started one
myself.  To join you first have to download the program and install it,
thus setting up an account.  Then go back to the main we page listed above
and click on groups.  Goto the bottom of the screen and seach for
"Colorado State Rams" w/o the quotes.  Click join and go from there.

Oh, and the group description was cutoff by their program.  The complete
text is below:  (apologies to those who do not read csu.general on a
regular basis and thus don't understand)

We are a mixed bunch of past and present students of Colorado State
University who have decided to expand our current searching from Remi's
left foot to loftier grails such as ET Intelligence.  Basically we have
all seen Star Wars Episode I and the football season is too far away to
excited about, so we needed something to do.  Although we typically work
for Guiness (or the occasional Murphys) we are all geeks at heart and
will thus do this work for free.

Good Day,
--bjw


-- 
Brian J Walter        |            walter@lamar.colostate.edu
Chem Graduate Student | Homebrewer               | RUSH Rocks Best!
Colorado State Univ   | BJCP National Beer Judge | CSU Rams #1!