Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
You may remember the SETI@Home Classic project as a screensaver that launched
in May 1999, which was used by millions. This version, known as SETI@Home Classic,
was retired in December 2005 when funding ran out. In those six years, 5,436,301
users from 226 countries provided the equivalent of 2,433,979.781 years of CPU time.
While the project didn't find signs of extraterrestrial life, it did make its mark as the
largest computation in history. From then on through today, the project continued
through the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) open
source platform for volunteer grid computing.
BOINC was originally created for SETI@Home in the Space Sciences Laboratory at
the University of California, Berkeley and now receives funding from the National Sci-
ence Foundation. In addition to SETI@Home, it now runs more than 40 other projects,
from Enigma@home, which is attempting to decode the remaining three unbroken
Enigma messages from World War II, to QMC@Home, which calculates molecular
geometry for the field of quantum chemistry.
If you've followed the work at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), you can use your
BOINC installation to participate in the LHC@home project. Once you've installed it,
you can also connect to those other projects that process data for research in nearly
every area of math and science. Data processed by more than 8 million hosts using
BOINC, the world's largest distributed computing project, has led to breakthroughs
in AIDS research, found new celestial objects, and even helped find a stolen laptop.
The most popular projects running on BOINC as of this writing are:
SETI@Home
The subject of this section
Einstein@Home
Searches for gravitational signals from pulsars and has discovered nearly 50 new
pulsars
World Community Grid
An IBM-sponsored humanitarian project that has partnered with hundreds of
other organizations on research from cancer to clean energy
BOINC can run continuously, taking advantage of unused processor time as it's avail-
able. Some people wholly devote older equipment to personal “SETI farms.” Devoting
a Raspberry Pi to always looking for ET could be your way of contributing to the project.
You could even build a “Raspberry Pi farm,” though it would unfortunately not grow
pie. But maybe that credit-card-sized computer will be the one that finds definitive
signs of life beyond Earth.
Read more about the early history of
SETI@Home
at
http://setia
