SETI to Upgrade Software, Telescope

Professor_Quail writes "Space.com reports that SETI@home is planning to transfer it's operations from Arecibo to another telescope in Australia, where they say lies an increased chance of finding extra-terrestrials. The Australian telescope is more powerful, with a wider view of the sky; scientists are betting that this new telescope will also help find signs of 'shriveling' black holes."

Comments

Dear Maude

[Graymalkin]

Please SETI@Home developers, if you chance my reading this please consider what I have to say.

Graphicless client. Yes I'm aware there is a command line client, it is a main in the ass to get running and have STAY running for many people. I'd like a client I can load up as a service in WinNT or a deamon in Unix that will run without my futzing with it or having to do anything but have the damn thing load from init. I think there's a slew of other SETI@Home users who'd appriciate this as well.

Worker threads. Oh please oh please oh please in your next revision add worker threads. I really don't need the graphics run in one thread and work units processed in another. I've got a dual P3 system that is on 24/7. Half of its processing capacity is sitting idle since I don't run the S@H screen saver. The monitor is off whenever the system isn't in use so the screen saver isn't much use.

Those two are the most important for me really. I run a couple distributed computing clients at different times but I started with S@H and have a special place for it in my widdle heart. I'm in it for the search itself, not to just have a cool screen saver. I think there's plenty of others who wouldn't mind a built for speed version of your client.

As an aside, does anyone know if any of the S@H work units are recycled and fed into other projects like studying pulsars or radio emitting variable stars? I'm not too up on the format of S@H work units but I thought it'd be cool if astronomers studying any sort of celestial phenomenae in radio bands could recycle WUs for their own purposes, even if they don't have a big distributed cluster working on them.

Wouldn't this be a better use for telescope time?

[PerryMason]

It strikes me as funny that we spend all this time and money looking for something that might exist when we could use the telescope time to search for near earth crossing (NEC) asteriods, which certainly do exist and represent a much greater potential danger than little green men.

There are essentially no searches being carried out in the Southern hemisphere at the present after the Howard government in Australia chose to withdraw all funding back in 1996.

In 1996 the Howard Government withdrew funding for Australia's only asteroid
tracking research project at the Siding Springs observatory in central New
South Wales. In 1994, the SA Government announced plans for a $140 million
optical telescope at Freeling Heights in the Flinders Ranges and a $200
million particle detector radio telescope near Woomera, but they were not
built. [The Age 22/9/00]

Maybe someone could look at an Asteroid@Home option as well?