SETI@home seeking volunteers
January 4th 2008
Berkeley News reports that SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is seeking new volunteers to crunch a flood of data--500 times more information than in years past.
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 US 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."
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.
Unlike the past years, SETI@home now relies on BOINC, a third-party application to process data units. This client can be used to donate idle computer time to a number of good causes.
Get your copy of BOINC 5.10.32 here (6.31MB) or read the release notes for more info.
'08 and Intel Core 2 Duo. From $599.
