Largest virtual supercomputer in the world for extraterrestials

The SETI@home Project pioneers the use of the Internet as a massive parallel computer for a data-driven task. The combined computing power of SETI@home's participants is far greater than the world's largest single supercomputer, with a combined power of more than 7 Teraflops. Data that would have taken a single desktop computer 100,000 years to analyze was analyzed in nearly five months, thanks to the volunteers.

Sun Powers The World's Largest Supercomputing Project The SETI@home Project is run entirely on Sun systems and technologies donated by Sun. Through its Academic Equipment Grant (AEG) Program, Sun has previously given SETI@home 3 Ultra(TM) 10 workstations and a Sun Enterprise(TM) 450 server, each with significant memory and storage capabilities and the Solaris(TM) Operating Environment, to power the world's largest supercomputer. Sun's latest donation of 2 Sun Enterprise 450 servers and an additional 1 GB of memory brings the total value of Sun's equipment donations to SETI@home to $250,000.

"This project is a significant step forward in the way that high performance computing projects are undertaken," said Kim Jones, vice president, Global Research and Education, Sun Microsystems. "The donated Sun systems and technologies are helping the Berkeley team communicate with and collect results from a variety of computing platforms worldwide easily and efficiently."

Sun has also been a significant contributor of computing cycles to the project, along with SGI, Intel, Compaq, and other companies and schools. Sponsors of SETI@home, in addition to Sun, include The Planetary Society, the University of California, and Fuji Film Computer Products.

SETI In Your Home Computer users who are interested in participating in the project simply download software that acts as a screensaver from the project's Website. The software is actually a sophisticated signal-processing program that runs whenever the computer is idle to analyze data collected by the Berkeley computer from the giant radiotelescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, seen in Jodie Foster's movie, "Contact."

"By harnessing the power of computers worldwide, SETI@home lets us do a much better job of listening for extraterrestrial signals than ever before", said Dr. David Anderson, director of the project. "It's a new way of doing supercomputing that may be useful for other projects besides SETI. And it has the added bonus of teaching people about science and getting them personally involved in it."

The goal of the SETI@home project, which is the first distributed, high performance computing project to offer the general public the opportunity to participate in important research, is to help the institution collect and analyze large amounts of critical radio data from space. The SETI@Home software analyzes data in search of strong spikes or repetitive patterns in radio signals in space. As the computer works on the data, the screen displays a three-dimensional graph charting the signal analysis. After the computer finishes with the analysis, it automatically sends the results back to the Berkeley computer via the Internet and grabs another piece of data for analysis.

For additional information about SETI@Home, or to download project software go to setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ .

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