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500-fold Increase in Data Flow from SETI Telescope

Posted by Soulskill on from the et-in-crystal-clear-high-defintion dept.

coondoggie brings us an article from Networkworld about a flood of new data for the SETI@home project. We discussed something similar a few months ago when a new telescope array went live. The vast amount of processing power required to handle the new data is prompting the SETI@home team to make a plea for more volunteers. Quoting the press release: "What triggered the new flow of data was the addition of seven new receivers at Arecibo, which now let the telescope 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."

5 of 346 comments (clear)

  1. Arecibo Shutdown? by XPisthenewNT · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I thought they were going to shut down Arecibo or move to an array of smaller antenna's or something? Did the plan change or am I making this up?

  2. carbon footprint? by Doppler00 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm just curious how much energy the SETI project has used with zero results thus far. Is the amount of resources and time they are contributing to this cause really worth the incalculable chance they get a signal from an alien civilization? Having millions of PC's running at 100% doing pattern searching seems like a huge waste of energy. I'll run distributed clients myself like folding@home that actually have research results. Usually, only during the winter though (since electric heat is my only option anyway).

  3. Arecibo? I thought they were closing it? by filbranden · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Arecibo? I thought they were closing it? At least they recently lost around 75% of their fundings.

  4. Re:Left seti when they went to bonic by zrq · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Me too. Last time I used it the Linux install involved way too many steps. It is packaged as a 'generic' Linux binary, and left up to the individual to tweak it to fit their particular system. I am quite happy to contribute spare cpu cycles to the project, but at the moment I don't have the spare sys-admin cycles required to setup, configure and babysit the software.

    If they want more people to install it, they need to do something like create a RPM installer and setup a yum repository. If the installation was as simple as 'yum install bonic' plus a simple Python configure script to set the project URL, then ReadHat could/would probably add it to Fedora. Which would mean that 1000's of people would see it listed in the install options, and some of them would probably give it a go.

    The other reason I left was the change in the way that stat were reported. When I started, their website showed a headline figure of number of CPU years in the last 24hrs. To me, seeing that figure increase as the project gained more users was a real incentive to add machines and contribute more to the project. It gave you the warm fuzzy feeling that we were all contributing to what was at the time one of the largest computing projects in the world.

    Now everything is listed as teams competing for 'credits', whatever they are. I didn't join to earn 'credits', I joined to participate in one of the largest collaborative computing projects in the world.

  5. Re:oh I dunno by bdjacobson · · Score: 5, Interesting

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

    Finding this in the parent's post is left as an exercise for the reader.