About the Seti Screensaver

History

• The SETI screensaver, officially called SETI@Home, was launched in May of 1999 by SETI. Since then, SETI@Home has been hosted by the Space Sciences Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley. The idea for processing radio telescope data through a network of computers over the Internet was originally thought up by David Gedye in 1995. Gedye went on to found the SETI@Home project four years later.

Function

• The SETI@Home screensaver processes data from Arecibo Observatory, a radio telescope in Puerto Rico. According to the SETI@Home's official website, "SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a scientific area whose goal is to detect intelligent life outside Earth. One approach, known as radio SETI, uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. Such signals are not known to occur naturally, so a detection would provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology." SETI@Home allows thousands of users to process small chunks of data individually.

Process

• The SETI@Home screensaver is an example of breaking a large job down into small, manageable parts, much like an assembly line. A large amount of raw data is collected at Arecibo Observatory and sent to SETI headquarters at the University of Berkeley, California. From there, the large lump of data from the radio satellite is broken down into small chunks. These chunks of data are sent to the thousands of computers worldwide running the SETI screensaver.

Signals

• SETI@Home works by looking for significant patterns in the radio signal recordings. Each "packet" of information contains about 100 seconds of audio, with the SETI@Home screensaver designed to look at 12-second chunks of audio at a time. The 100 seconds of audio overlap with other 100 second chunks, so that there are no gaps.

Statistics

• As of June 2010, there are more than 279,000 active computers running SETI@Home, according to SETI's figures. In the history of the program, the total amount of computers running the screensaver is above 2.6 million. That figure of 2.6 million includes users from 234 different countries, processing an average of 727.982 TeraFLOPS of floating point operations per second.

Screensaver

• The SETI@Home screensaver automatically runs when your computer has been idle for a pre-set period of time, just like most other screensavers. The screensaver program downloads chunks of data from the SETI server. Although the SETI screensaver has minimal system requirements, it does require an active Internet connection. The downloaded information is converted from audio to raw data by SETI. Once the SETI screensaver finishes processing a chunk of data, the results of the analysis are uploaded to SETI's server.