SETI Shuts Down

Click image to enlarge

SETI@Home, a hugely popular distributed computing project, is being switched off on December 15. What is distributed computing? You take a problem, break it up (or, "chunk" it) into thousands of pieces, and then distribute and solve the pieces on individual computers...in this case hundreds of thousands of PCs.

The SETI project searches for signals from other civilizations. I have run it for years now. Anytime your computer is idle, Seti@home begins processing data from the SETI project. When the problem is finished computing, your PC uploads the results and downloads the next problem. What makes it so popular is the included screen saver that showed your PC's progress in solving the problem. It is compelling and well-done. The problems themselves are data from outer space, captured at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Your computer analyzes radio signals (e.g., noise from outer space), looking for patterns and regular occurrences. . .looking for our cousins out there in space. They built this screensaver to be a graphic indicator of the problem you are solving. Watching it makes you feel like you're contributing! It is fun to watch, and fun to be part of a global project. This was not some nut-job deal, but a legitimate scientific endeavor...even if some of us in the field tilt toward the wack-job end of things.

The SETI team is merging with the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. According to The Inquirer: "The workunit totals of users and teams will be frozen at that point, and the final totals will be available on the web."

A SETI spokesman said that "those who want to keep looking for aliens can do so, but they will also be able to donate computer time studying climate change or other BOINC projects." As if!

SETI is the first distributed computing project and has resulted in thousands of idle machines around the world doing something worthwhile and crunching trillions of numbers. It was fun while it lasted. It will be interesting to see the next distributed projects, and if they capture the public's imagination the way SETI has.
---o0o---