 |
Science and Engineering Node Services Updated: November 21, 2002 |
|
Science and Engineering Node Services Updated: November 21, 2002 |
Science and Engineering Node Services at the University at Buffalo, SUNY has many cycles of unused computer power in the form of very powerful workstations that are idle from time-to-time, especially during the summer recess. In July of 1999, we decided to harness that power to help an effort that we considered worthwhile: The SETI@home project.
On October 27, 2002, we hit a major milestone, 500 CPU years of contributed time!
On November 21, 2002, We hit another milestone, 200,000 contributed work units!
Here's the blurb from their home page:
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 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.
Basically, data from the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico is gathered by SERENDIP, a project at UC Berkeley, and split into 300 KB chunks. These chunks can be downloaded and analyzed by personal computers and workstations, which then send the results back. Results that are "interesting" are then flagged for further analysis.
There is SETI@home client software for Microsoft Windows and Macintosh systems, which runs as a screensaver. There is also client software for a variety of Unix systems, including the Solaris system we use. We have tailored that software so that it starts up when users log out of lab-based Sun workstations, and stops when someone logs in, so there is no overhead while users are getting their work done.
We are currently running SETI@home on:
Some members of SENS also run this on their home systems.
You can view our current statistics here. We are at position 44 in the list of Top Users, and position 9 in the list of Top Users at School. However, it is probably unfair to compare us to individual users, as we have a large number of machines all running as the same "user". The team data below is probably more meaningful, and more significant.
We are part of the University at Buffalo Group, one of three groups currently associated (but not officially affiliated) with the University. The others are UBForce and The Drunken Cannibals. Our group has made the list of the Top 100 University Teams, and is at position 14 as of this writing.
To view aggregate data for all ".buffalo.edu" SETI@home participants, including those not in the group shown above, click here. As of this writing, we are at position 16 in the list of Subdomains of edu, which uses this collective data.
Snapshots of our progress, taken at around eight minutes after every hour, can be found here (brief form), here (short form), or here (long form). The blinking messages indicate workstations where the software is not currently running, usually due to someone being logged in, but occasionally due to system problems. These pages were generated using the PerlSETI and HTMLPerlSETI packages, slightly modified.
The software we use to install, start and stop SETI@home on our workstations can be found in a gzipped tar file located here. The install script is built for either standalone or JumpStart use, but will need to be modified for your site. As usual, no guarantees if this doesn't work for you ...
 |
SETI@home |
|
SERENDIP |
|
The SETI Institute |
|
Arecibo Observatory |
|
HTMLPerlSETI |
|
PerlSETI |
