Beginning Monday, May 17, anyone in the world with a desktop  computer will be able to join the University of California, Berkeley's search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The campus's SETI@home project already has a list of nearly  400,000 people from 96 countries anxiously awaiting the final  version of software that will let them crunch data in search of  intelligent radio signals from advanced civilizations.

To date, some  12,000 people have been involved in testing the software and have racked up about 200 years' worth of computing time. "I'm amazed at the extreme eagerness of people to use this," said  computer scientist David Anderson, SETI@home project director. "Every day I get email in all languages saying, 'Give me the  software NOW!'" Many others have volunteered their time to do programming, help  build a website and even translate instructions into other  languages, added Dan Werthimer, the project scientist and a research  physicist at the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley. Come Monday, computer geeks and students, science fiction fans  and retirees, all can jump to the SETI@home website  and download  versions of the software for Windows machines, Macintosh computers  and 30 varieties of the Unix operating system.

On Windows and Macintosh machines, the software acts like a  screensaver - whenever the computer is idle, the SETI@home software  takes over and begins analyzing data in search of strong spikes or  repetitive patterns in radio signals from space. The data come from  the large radio telescope at Arecibo in Puerto Rico and are broken  into small chunks that are sent to individual computers for  analysis. As the computer works away at the data, the screen displays a  three-dimensional graph charting the signal analysis. Participants also can view maps showing where the SETI@home project is searching  and who is taking part in the project. After the computer is finished with the analysis, it sends the  results back to UC Berkeley through the internet and grabs another  chunk of data. "This project lets us do SETI a lot, lot faster, with 10 times  more sensitivity and exploring more thoroughly the spectrum of radio frequencies we scan," Werthimer said. "Plus, it's a fun and  educational project, a global science project."  "Never before has there been an opportunity for anyone, anywhere  in the world to join the scientific search for intelligent beings elsewhere in our universe," said Louis Friedman, executive director  of the Planetary Society, which provided early seed money and is a  principal sponsor for the project. "This is a grand experiment - in  science, in technology and in society - a global cooperative effort  at the frontiers of knowledge."

The project also is an experiment in "distributed computing" - a  way of breaking down a problem requiring lots of computation into  small chunks that can be done by many small computers distributed  anywhere in the world. The seti@home project is the first  distributed computing project to offer the general public the opportunity to participate in important research. "This will be the largest distributed computing project ever,"  Anderson predicted. The project was launched three years ago with the Planetary  Society  in cooperation with Paramount  Pictures, providing $100,000 for development of the publicly  available software. Sun Microsystems also donated computing equipment and the University of California provided matching funds of $180,000 from its Digital Media Innovation Program .

The idea of linking computers in a global network to analyze  radio data from space originated with David Gedye, a UC Berkeley  computer science graduate and a former student of Anderson."SETI@home is a way of harnessing all the idle computers to increase our computing capacity and our chance of finding  extraterrestrials," Werthimer said. Werthimer and other UC Berkeley physicists operate several    ongoing SETI projects, including a 20-year-old project, the Search  for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed  Intelligent Populations (SERENDIP), whose newest instrument,  SERENDIP IV, piggybacks on the Arecibo telescope. But the computer  capacity available to SERENDIP is sufficient to look for only the  most obvious signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, Werthimer said. SETI@home will let SERENDIP physicists analyze more thoroughly  the data they receive daily from their ongoing survey of the sky   using the large radio dish at Arecibo.

The radio data is broken down into small chunks - a 10 kilohertz   range of wavelengths in a strip of sky visible from Puerto Rico -  through which the screen saver program can search for patterns that   may indicate a deliberate broadcast from a distant civilization. The data downloaded to each desktop computer takes up only about 250  kilobytes of computer memory, though the computer must have 32 megabytes of RAM (random access memory) to run the screensaver  software."You can download enough data through the internet in five  minutes to keep the computer analyzing for several days," Anderson  said. "The computer then sends back a summary of the interesting  stuff it found and gets another chunk of data." Whatever interesting signals may turn up from SETI@home must be checked by project staff to make sure they are not due to radio interference from Earth or orbiting satellites. "We're not asking people to call the press when they see a spike on the screen," Werthimer said. "We get strong signals all the time  and have to sift through them."

Worth Hill Observatory joins in the search for E.T.

First impressions of SETI@home:

I had a few problems accessing the seti@home website but third time was lucky and after a five minute download the program happily installed itself on my machine - (you need a Pentium and at least 32Mb RAM). It then prompted me to reconnect to the website for registering my e-mail address and collected the first chunk of data which amounted to about 350K.

The whole program is very well designed and runs very slickly - it certainly sorted itself out on my machine and is "doing" what it's meant to be "doing" without any intervention from me! It tells me that my first data set was recorded at Arecibo on 1999 Jan 7th at 15:13h U.T. from a patch of sky in Ophiuchus at RA 17h 38m 31s Dec +4deg 29m 23s at a base frequency of 1.419882811 GHz.

The help file is very clear and concise and a FAQ covers most of the likely problems. I have it running in screen-saver mode and my only criticism of it lies in not having a decent explanation of what is actually being processed (however a visit back to the Seti@home website gave extensive notes). I can see a very impressive 3D histogram of Power/Frequency (0-9765 Hz) over Time (0-107.4 sec) which changes rapidly from either appearing very "blocky" or very "spiky" as each chunk is processed. Is there any feature we should be looking out for that says "Hey look at me I'm the real E.T."

Well how is it getting on I hear you ask? So far it has been running for 2hr 22min and has processed 2.22% of my first data packet. Sorry computer but you're going to have to burn the midnight oil tonight <g>.

My first data packet now processed!

In screen saver mode I finally concluded processing my first work unit of data. This took 34hr 19min and the program let me know that it wished to reconnect to the Seti@home website - the small green dish on the Task bar kept flashing and a message scrolled across the screen. However a few problems occurred when I logged on as very little actually happened. . Presumably the site was busy and after a few minutes of total inactivity I logged off. When I reconnected an hour or so later a new work unit began to be transmitted, but as far as I know the data that I had processed had not been returned. Oh dear .......E.T. lost in cyberspace. I'll  try and find out why.......

Two work units now returned

Most of my problems have now sorted themselves out, and I find that the work units once completed are sent back to seti@home site in a matter of seconds before a  new  data packet  is uploaded. It seems my computer is getting a bit smarter - only needed 32hrs for that last one.

You too can join the search for E.T. .....just click here