A New Beginning for SETI@Home
Five years ago today, on Dec. 12, 2000, I created an account with the SETI@Home project and signed up my computer(s) to help analyze radio signals from the Aricebo telescope in search of signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. SETI@Home, while not the first volunteer distributed computing (DC) project, is certainly the most popular and most widely-known. The “Classic” version of the client has attracted 5,436,301 users who have been dazzled by the screen saver that illustrates the radio signal one’s computer is analyzing.
The SETI@Home team also contributed to the creation of BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. BOINC is basically the ‘@Home’ portion of volunteer DC projects, providing a middle-ware infrastructure upon which other DC projects can operate and obtain volunteer computing resources. SETI@Home has transitioned its work onto the BOINC platform and now has nearly 310,000 users moved over to the new platform providing access to around 625,000 computers. The computing power of the combined BOINC SETI users, who provide 9,674.2 GigaFLOPs of processing prowess, is considerable. It would place the BOINC SETI users at the 29th slot in the Top 500 Supercomputers list. All of BOINC combined comes in at 101,725.5 GigaFLOPs, or #2 on the Supercomputer list. (IBM’s BlueGene/L does 280,600 GigaFLOPs and cost over $100 million.)
The “Classic” SETI@Home client will be forever shut down in just three days, on December 15, 2005. In the two weeks since a story announcing the transition appeared on slashdot.org on November 23, the number of new users of the BOINCified SETI has grown by over 58,000 or 23%. Other BOINC projects, such as Einstein@Home, Rosetta@Home, and Predictor@Home have seen a similar increase in their user base over that time period. Einstein +13,000 (+19%), Rosetta +15,000 (+165%!!!), and Predictor +6,650 (+20%). However, SETI still accounts for 63.4% of the work done by BOINC users.
Of all those who joined SETI@Home on the same day as me, five years ago, 84 have persevered and submitted work units within the last month. My last work unit submitted was in January of this year, having completed 1,872 work units taking 4.106 years of CPU time, averaging 1.02 results per day. This places me in 188,402nd place among SETI Classic users, a rank shared by 82 others. I completed more work units than 96.533% of SETI@Home Classic users.
Currently the computers I have myself are fairly busy acting as servers or as my personal laptop, but the student group at Boalt I am so overly-involved with, boalt.org, now has its own BOINC teams where the boalt.org office computers and computers of members contribute to various BOINC projects. You’re welcome to join us.
This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.