SETI is ready for your computer

Project director David Anderson explains how the SETI@home program would work. This is a prototype screen shot of the user interface.

Science Editor Alan Boyle explains the sounds of SETI.
Audio courtesy of SETI@home

SETI is ready for your computer
Unix versions of SETI@home released to the public at last

By Alan Boyle MSNBC

April 6 — After years of development, software that searches for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence has been released for mass distribution. But if you’re waiting for Windows, you’ll have to wait a little longer: The first stripped-down versions of SETI@home are designed for Unix systems.

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Highlights of the SETI search

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	There are many strategies in the search for extraterrestrial life. Which do you think could be the most fruitful?

	* 45773 responses

	Looking for traces of ancient life on Mars. 17%

	Exploring the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. 14%

	Listening for faraway radio signals. 30%

	Investigating distant Earthlike planets. 34%

	None of the above (discuss on Space News BBS). 5%
Survey results tallied every 60 seconds. Live Votes reflect respondents' views and are not scientifically valid surveys.

THE CONCEPT behind SETI@home seems straightforward: Take radio signals from the biggest radio telescope in the world, carve the most promising data into thousands of pieces and pass it out in an orderly fashion to thousands of computers over the Internet. Each of those computers analyzes a snippet of data for what could be the signature of an intentional transmission from a distant star system. If such a signature is found, flag that snippet for further confirmation by professionals.
But it’s taken more than three years to write the software. In that time, more than 300,000 computer users have signed up to download the software once it becomes available. The list is growing by about 1,000 e-mail addresses every day, says project director David Anderson.
Thanks to a lot of volunteers and hefty corporate contributions, more than a dozen flavors of Unix software were made publicly available Monday via the SETI@home Web site.
Don’t expect any big fanfare, however, until the Windows version is ready to go, most likely by mid-May. The Mac version will follow soon afterward.

COMPUTER COMPLICATIONS
Chief scientist Dan Werthimer, an astronomer at the University of California at Berkeley, said the Unix versions could be released first because they don’t have the snazzy graphical user interface found in Windows and Mac versions — a feature that makes the program more accessible but also requires more tweaking. Also, the relatively small and sophisticated user base for Unix means the ramp-up will be more gradual.
“We don’t anticipate a lot of people using it,” Werthimer said of the Unix versions. “It’s really an opportunity for us to test the system. When we make the PC version available, that’s when there are going to be a lot of people using it.”
As of Tuesday, about 1,400 people were using the program, including beta testers, he said. He estimated that 1,000 had downloaded the program since it became publicly available.
“The Unix people are grinding away,” he said. “We’re getting a lot of work done.”
The key test will be when the number of users rises to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands.
Werthimer realizes that such an unprecedented experiment in distributed computing could lose data or go horribly awry if the load becomes too great. “If we ramp it up slowly, we can stop at some point if we have to,” he said.

LESSONS LEARNED AT ARECIBO
Meanwhile, another SETI project finished up two weeks of observations at the Arecibo Observatory, the same telescope providing data for SETI@home. The session was part of Project Phoenix’s methodical effort to monitor 1,000 stars considered prime candidates in the search for alien civilizations.