How many people here participate in the SETI@Home project?
Is the a SD team? Is anyone interested?
My fiancé has been an active part of SETI@Home for months. And hey, you just reminded me, I want to be a part of it, too. If nothing else, it makes for a seriously cool screensaver.
Carl Sagan, eat your heart out! (Well, I know you’re dead, and it is a little hard to do, but…)
Hi again, Gatsby-
I have SETI on both of my computers at work.
Have you been having trouble getting connected to download the data in the past few weeks? It is really frustrating.
Scotti
So, is it just me, or do you think there should be a “team” formed?
I do. In fact, presumptuous as it may seem for someone who’s been here for about 5 minutes, I started one.
I think this project kicks ass and I hope we can get some people here involved. Anyone with me?
Sign me up. Sat thru as much of “Contact” as I could before I realized it was never going to stop being boring and thought about seti@home. Just couldn’t remember what it was called. You reminded me. Thanks.
Oh, and Scotti, I haven’t had any problems lately with the connections, except when the servers were down last week.
I’m in!
Count me in. I think I have 27 data units thus far.
By the way, does anyone know what “chirping data” means?
Cool. Anyone who wants to crunch as many units as possible should disable the screen saver. If you don’t have it set to run all the time, set your screen saver to blank screen at 0 minutes.
The graphics look cool, but they eat up about half of your CPU cycles (taking twice as long to crunch a unit).
Alternately, for the very best performance, you can run the CLI (command line interphase or “text only”) version. Go here and download the i386-winnt-cmdline.exe file. It will run fine on 95/98/NT/2000 boxes and is faster than the GUI client.
If there are any moderators reading this, (or anyone tight with the mods) I wonder if we could put up a link to the team in all forums.
I know some people hang out in just one or two forums and I don’t want to crosspost this. However I would like someone with authority to.
Uh, sorry, that’s command line interface. I hate not being able to edit on these boards. Sucks for the spelling impaired.
“It is a damned poor mind, indeed, which cannot think of at least two ways to spell any word.” - Andrew Jackson
Chronos-
[q]Chirping Data
It’s quite unlikely that an alien planet will be at rest with respect to our Earth. You may remember that humankind is whizzing along on a rotating planet which is revolving around the Sun, which itself is orbiting the center of our Milky Way galaxy. We can assume that our extra-terrestrial friends are likewise situated.
There is an interesting effect that all this motion will have on a signal emitted from a moving source and/or received on a moving planet. This is the doppler effect. You are undoubtably familiar with this if you’ve heard a car honking its horn as it passes you. The frequency, or pitch, of the sound changes as the car passes. You can go out and try this yourself. Stand at the side of the road and listen as a friend drives by with the horn blasting. You could also drive by a stationary car honking its horn and you will also hear the pitch change. It’s the relative velocity that’s important.
Although our remote friends aren’t honking their horns at us, they are sending waves (electromagnetic waves) at us. Their signal will be distorted by the mutual motions of our two systems in much the same way that the car horns are distorted. To disentangle this the SETI@home screensaver analyzes the data many times over trying a great variety of possible doppler accelerations. Actually, the screensaver first takes the raw data and mathematically “undoes” a specific doppler acceleration or “chirp”. It then feeds the resulting “de-accelerated” data to the FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) routines. This is called “De-chirping” the data. SETI@home tries to do this at many points between -10 Hz/sec to +10 Hz/sec. At the finest frequency resolution of 0.075 Hz we check for 5409 different chirp rates between -5 Hz/sec and +5 Hz/sec![/q]
The seti@home team for alt.fan.cecil-adams can be found at:
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgi?cmd=team_lookup&name=alt.fan.cecil-adams
I’ve been a participant for a year or so, and I have a team that currently has 5.11 years of CPU time …
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/stats/team/team_4625.html
(wow, the afca team is team_31937… theirs is much larger than mine though)
I also do distributed.net and have a team for that…
Unfortunately I haven’t run the software anytime recently for either of them.
http://fathom.org/opalcat/distributed.html
My office has Seti in the labs and the shipping area, as those computers are not used continuously and have the resources.
Just doing our small part to help crunch data.
OK, Gatsby, my 130 or so units are yours.
I’m in. I haven’t undertaken nearly enough projects that’ll never amount to anything. :rolleyes:
I’ve been doing SETI packets since they were in beta 2 years ago…and yet I only have 1200 packets to show for it.
I work in IT, and it’s become standard practice in my office that any (and every) new machine that comes in gets benchmarked by running SETI and seeing how long it takes to do a couple of packets. We have a group which has completed about 7500 packets, taking 13.8 years of CPU time.
Folks, keep in mind here that the amount of time is not impressive, unless it’s really LOW. The faster you complete packets the better. The more packets you complete, the better.
(okay, so maybe we’re a little competitive over here. Sue me.)
121 work units donated to the cause!
Okay, I just joined the group. You got my 84 units. I used to run it constantly in the background, day and night, but when I split my computer (my dad and I now have our own desktops) I forgot to put Seti in Startup, so I’ve lost about six or eight months of use… Damn. But I put it back.
–Tim