JOIN TEAMWISDOM NOW! Are we alone in the universe? We hope not. Several programs are now looking for the evidence of life elsewhere in the cosmos. Collectively, these programs are called SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). SETI@home is a scientific experiment that harnesses the power of hundreds of thousands of Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data. There's a small but captivating possibility that your computer will detect the faint murmur of a civilization beyond Earth.   SETI@Home is a project where your computer screen saver can be used to process SETI data collected at the Arecibo Radio Observatory. It's simple... Download the SETI Screen Saver Install the Screen Saver & Receive Your First Packet of Data You 'll choose a nickname (be creative) and you'll receive your password by e-mail. Go Here and Join TeamWisdom Click on Join. Enter your e-mail address & password. If you don't have your password yet, click on "If you don't know your password, click here." Click Join Group and you're an official TeamWisdom member. Once you're a member of TeamWisdom and your computer starts analyzing data, you can visit TeamWisdom at any time to see who's joined and how much time our team has spent analyzing data and furthering the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. (TeamWisdom T-Shirts are on the drawing board. Join Now and You'll Be Eligible For a Free T)   WHAT AM I GETTING INTO? ABOUT SETI@HOME Most of the SETI programs in existence today, including this one at UC Berkeley build large computers that analyze data in real time. None of these computers look very deeply at the data for weak signals nor do they look for a large class of signal types. They are limited by the amount of computer power available for data analysis. To tease out the weakest signals, a great amount of computer power is necessary. It would take a monstrous supercomputer to get the job done. SETI programs could never afford to build or buy that computing power. There is a trade-off that they can make. Rather than a huge computer to do the job, they could use a smaller computer but just take longer to do it. But then there would be lots of data piling up. What if they used LOTS of small computers, all working simultaneously on different parts of the analysis? Where can the SETI team possibly find thousands of computers they'd need to analyze the data continuously streaming from Arecibo?   The UC Berkeley SETI team has discovered that there are already thousands of computers that might be available for use. Most of these computers sit around most of the time with toasters flying across their screens accomplishing absolutely nothing and wasting electricity to boot. This is where SETI@home (and you!) come into the picture. The SETI@home project hopes to convince you to allow us to borrow your computer when you aren't using it and to help us "äsearch out new life and new civilizations." We'll do this with a screen saver that can go get a chunk of data from us over the internet, analyze that data, and then report the results back to us. When you need your computer back, our screen saver instantly gets out of the way and only continues its analysis when you are finished with your work.   It's an interesting and difficult task. There's so much data to analyze that it seems impossible! Fortunately, the data analysis task can be easily broken up into little pieces that can all be worked on separately and in parallel. None of the pieces depends on the other pieces. Also, there is only a finite amount of sky that can be seen from Arecibo. In the next two years the entire sky as seen from the telescope will be scanned three times. We feel that this will be enough for this project. By the time we've looked at the sky three times, there will be new telescopes, new experiments, and new approaches to SETI. We hope that you will be able to participate in them too!   Data is recorded on high-density tapes at the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, filling about one 35 Gbyte DLT tape per day. Because Arecibo does not have a high bandwidth Internet connection, the data tape must go by snail-mail to Berkeley. The data is then divided into 0.25 Mbyte chunks (which we call "work-units"). These are sent from the Seti@Home server over the Internet to people around the world to analyze.   SETI@home connects only when transferring data. This occurs only when the screen saver has finished analyzing the work-unit and wants to send back the results (and get another work-unit.) We'll only do this with your permission and allow you to control when your computer connects to us or, we'll give you the option to set the screen saver to transfer data automatically as soon as it's done with the current work-unit. The data transmission lasts for less than 5 minutes with most common modems and we'll disconnect immediately after all data is transferred.   Work units are kept track of in Berkeley with a large database. When the work-units are returned to Berkeley, they are merged back into the database and marked "done." The computers look for a new work-unit for you to process and send it out, marking it "in progress" in the database. If SETI doesn't hear back from you for a long time, we'll assume that you've abandoned us (and boy, should you feel guilty!) your unfinished work will eventually be assigned to someone else.   BACK TO MISSION CONTROL (Weller Tractor Salvage Home Page) Home | Parts | Salvage Machines | Search Inventory | Communicate | UPS | Links Newsletter | Wisdom | UPN Converntions | SETI | Jeremy's Art | Disclaimer © Copyright 2005. All rights reserved. Contact Weller Tractor Salvage, Inc.