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What Do These Have In Common?

What Do These Have In Common?. “Contact” “Star Wars” “Star Trek” “Alien”.

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What Do These Have In Common?

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  1. What Do These Have In Common? • “Contact” • “Star Wars” • “Star Trek” • “Alien” They all deal with extra-terrestrial intelligent life, interacting with humankind. Is this science fiction or will it one day be a fact of life? What are we, as an intelligent, technological species, doing to make the single most important discovery come to pass?

  2. SETI at Home Parallel Processing on a Global Scale Andrew Boldin

  3. The Search • SETI – The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence • SETI@Home - Downloadable program which runs as a screen saver or constantly in background

  4. SETI History • The first search took place April 8, 1960 • There have been over 60 searches since • Data received in less than one second from Arecibo’s 305 meter dish would total more than the entire first search • SETI and NASA joined forces in 1992, after four years of talks and formalities • Long term plans include the building of the Allen Array, equivalent to a 100 meter dish • Other long term plans include piggybacking the SETI program on currently running other programs

  5. Global Parallel Processing • Internet based • SETI, based out of the University of California, Berkeley • 3 Million + users throughout the world • Years of processor time can be accomplished in a single day

  6. How Does It Work? • Download the program and install • Fill out a small form for membership login and password • Download a “work unit,” average size 340k • The program analyzes the packet for “candidate signals” • Results are sent to SETI and the process repeats from the download work unit stage

  7. More About the Process • Data on one 35 Gb DLT tape per day over a two year project duration • Multiple copies sent to multiple users for processing, no one person can lose unique data • About 100 seconds of audio-equivalent data plus information about the clip, or around 340 kb of total data in a “work unit” • “Work units” comprise a 2.5 Mhz wide band, centered at 1420 Mhz; each “work unit” is a 10 khz “slice” – remember that these are radio waves, not sound waves

  8. Work Unit “Slice” Structure

  9. For What Are We Looking? • Gaussians, or Bell Curves over a 12 second period of time lasting the time it takes for a system to go into and out of the telescope as it points across the sky • Pulsed signals indicate more chance of intelligent, data-carrying signals • Distortion expected from rotation of Earth, other planet

  10. Total Statistics • * As of 10:00 PM, Wednesday, April 10, 2002. ** Refers to new users, not recently connected users

  11. Questions, Comments?

  12. References • http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu • http://history.nasa.gov/seti.html • http://www.seti.org/general/history.html • http://www.spacesounds.com • http://www.setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/links.html • http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/mx/

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