SETI@HOME needs more volunteers

SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestial Intelligence) needs your help. Recent improvements to the equipment used to search the sky for evidence of alien civilizations is generating 500 times more data than the original SETI search. You can help analyze this data by running a small program which processes a small chunk of this data while your computer is otherwise idle. To get started, visit http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ and download the BOINC client.

BERKELEY – The longest-running search for radio signals from alien civilizations is getting a burst of new data from an upgraded Arecibo telescope, which means the SETI@home project needs more desktop computers to help crunch the data.

Since SETI@home launched eight years ago, the project based at the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory has signed up more than 5 million interested volunteers and boasts the largest community of dedicated users of any Internet computing project: 170,000 devotees on 320,000 computers.

Yet, new and more sensitive receivers on the world's largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, and better frequency coverage are generating 500 times more data for the project than before. The SETI@home software has been upgraded to deal with this new data as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) enters a new era and offers a new opportunity for those who want to help find other civilizations in the universe.

"The next generation SETI@home is 500 times more powerful then anything anyone has done before," said project chief scientist Dan Werthimer. "That means we are 500 times more likely to find ET than with the original SETI@home."

According to project scientist Eric Korpela, the new data amounts to 300 gigabytes per day, or 100 terabytes (100,000 gigabytes) per year, about the amount of data stored in the U.S. Library of Congress. "That's why we need all the volunteers," he said. "Everyone has a chance to be part of the largest public participation science project in history."