Anyone who's seen Contact will be aware of the group SETI, the "Search for Extra
Terrestrial Intelligence". Well on May 17th they finally started their SETI@
project. Anyone with a PC and an Internet connection can become part of a giant
distributed computer analysing data gathered from powerful telescopes to try to
uncover little green men. This approach of distributed computing has been used
before to great effect (many IFIS members have been involved in the RC5
problem). The idea is that while your PC is on and not being used there's a lot
of processing power lying around being wasted. If it could instead be working
away on a tiny piece of a big problem then it would be making a valid
contribution. You may not think that your average PC is up to much but when you
consider that in the first four weeks they had 600,000 PCs sign up it starts to
add up pretty quickly.
If you're interested, go to http://www.setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ and download
the program which will run on most operating systems. This will run as a
screensaver analysing data when you're off down the pub and will update results
and download new data when you connect to the Net. Easy.
I've created a team "IFIS" which anyone is welcome to join.
Richard
---
"A Smith & Wesson beats four aces"
Email: richard@
ICQ#: 1492328
Terrestrial Intelligence". Well on May 17th they finally started their SETI@
project. Anyone with a PC and an Internet connection can become part of a giant
distributed computer analysing data gathered from powerful telescopes to try to
uncover little green men. This approach of distributed computing has been used
before to great effect (many IFIS members have been involved in the RC5
problem). The idea is that while your PC is on and not being used there's a lot
of processing power lying around being wasted. If it could instead be working
away on a tiny piece of a big problem then it would be making a valid
contribution. You may not think that your average PC is up to much but when you
consider that in the first four weeks they had 600,000 PCs sign up it starts to
add up pretty quickly.
If you're interested, go to http://www.setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ and download
the program which will run on most operating systems. This will run as a
screensaver analysing data when you're off down the pub and will update results
and download new data when you connect to the Net. Easy.
I've created a team "IFIS" which anyone is welcome to join.
Richard
---
"A Smith & Wesson beats four aces"
Email: richard@
ICQ#: 1492328