Hello, I am an microcontroller programmer and I was wondering if anyone ever thought of a way to use microcontrollers or digital signal processors to crunch numbers for programs like SETI@home. I am new to programming but I thought it might be able to figure out how the SETI@home program searches through a workunit and processes it. Is there any documentation which specifies what exactly it is that SETI@home searches for or how it functions? The microcontrollers work at a much slower clock speed (4MHz or higher) but run on very minimal current (as low as a few milliamps) and low voltage (2 to 5V). I know some microcontrollers can be used to connect to the internet so retrieving and send data could be possible. Thought this might be an interesting project if it was possible to find out any more information on how each distributed computing program works. Anyone out there have any ideas?

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Does anyone know how the SETI@home project works?

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It's all open-source, and it's (presumably) reasonably portable code...

> Does anyone know how the SETI@home project works?

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I haven't looked at the code enough to know all the gritty details but I do know that most of the calculations involve floating point numbers and there are a lot of FFTs (fast fourier transforms) involved. As far as I know (and I may be wrong - I am certainly not an expert) microcontrollers usually aren't made to do floating point calculations quickly.

I do know that seti@home is examining the possibilities of using your computer's GPU to help out with some of the calculations since these chips are optimized for exactly these kids of calculations. Don't know if they have actually tried or accomplished anything on that front but it has been mentioned as a 'future possibility' a couple of times.

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Until recently, most GPUs just are fast at bit twiddling, and did virtually all their calculations in integer math. (you can simulate floating point with integers, check any Apple II, or Atari 800 ;)

The last generation or two of GPUs, I think..don't quote me... has started to include float onboard.

Seti is checking into it...most tests of GPU seti functions (a few functions were converted) showed bad lag problems from uploading and downloading data to the graphics memory. That was the last report I read.

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Theres an overview on how seti@home functions here and details on how BOINC operates here. The BOINC Community and Resources page has links you can check out - source code, mailing lists and so on.

If a microcontroller or DSP turns out to be too small, you can always try something smaller in scope. Googling SETI DSP came up with a bunch of links to other projects, including Setisearch - An open source real-time SETI program for Linux and SetiLeague.

Lots of stuff to look thru, maybe you can get some ideas for a project.

My thinking was just to have the DSP or MCU do purely number crunching and nothing for graphics. The graphics are pretty and all but I imagine that eats up a good portion of the performance.

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> The last generation or two of GPUs, I think..don't quote me... has started to
> include float onboard.
This is correct. ATI's R300 and better cores (Radeon 9x00) and nVidia's NV40 cores (GeForce 6x00) both can do real floating point. The feature was added for HDR rendering, and hasn't seen much use even until today (though a few games have added in HDR support)

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