I dont want to go into it too much, mainly because I dont really know that much about it. Basically it is the Search for Extra Terestrial Intelligence. What it means is searching for aliens. The general idea of
SETI@home
is that a big ass radio telescope in Aricebo (I think thats how its spelt) collects all these radio signals and stores them. They then use supercomputers to rip through the data and search for frequencies which may or may not be alien signals or something like that. However even the fastest supercomputer in the world would take forever and an eternity to sort through all the data that has been gathered.
To speed the process, someone at SETI come up with the idea of breaking the data into little chunks and processing them seperatley on different computers. What now happens is that users who wish to do so, can help the search by downloading and installing a piece of software that will automatically download a chunk of this data (a workunit) and begin processing it. Once done, the results are sent back to the server for examination, and a new work unit is downloaded, and so the process continues.
WTF?
People who work SETI units are generally members of a team. In this particular instance, you, faithful atomic reader, are to become a member of the ATOMICMPC SETI team. Why would you want to do this? Its very simple.
- Atomic is trailing the arse end of the world in the SETI@Home effort.
- You love atomic and want to help out in anyway possible.
- Together, we can make a difference (saw that on a charity commercial or something, sounded good at the time).
Bearing all of the above in mind, it is time to take the challenge and either sign up for SETI@home today, or move from your current crappy team into the prestegious ranks of team AtomicMPC.
For More Information
If you want to learn more about SETI with ACTUAL information, rather then whatever I have been blabbing on about, visit the Links section OR navigate your way about the SETI site by clicking the SETI image above.
