Friday, May 22nd, 2009

Happy Birthday, SETI@Home

The SETI@Home client can run as a screenscaver, processing data when your computer would otherwise be idle. courtesy SETI@Home Project.

For ten years, people have been donating processing time on their personal computers to sift the cosmic radio spectrum for signals from extraterrestrials. The SETI@Home project began in 1999 and sparked a wave of similar 'distributed computing' projects studying topics from climate prediction to protein folding. In the ten years since it started, five million SETI@home volunteers in 226 countries have donated over three million years of computing time -- an amount that Dan Werthimer, lead scientist on the project calls "the largest computation that's ever been done, on this planet anyway." We'll talk with him about the hunt, and the field of SETI research in general.