Greetings,

First post here. I saw this on a documentary and immediately thought it was a fantastic thing to get involved with.

I was wondering what it means when a 'stop sign' shows next to a process. Also, could the processes/tasks be explained in any way? I can't find anywhere that says what the list of tasks being performed represent. It could mean absolutely anything. I'm happy to let it work in the background but I wouldn't mind a little info if it's possible.

Kind regards,

O.D.

Welcome to SETI@Home

Each task is a small sample of the radio signal collected from the Arecibo radio telescope. We are screening these signals for particular patterns that are not associated with either human or known "natural" radio activity.
It is possible to work out some of what each task means by looking at the task name. It the first two characters are "AP", then it is an Astropule task, otherwise the first six characters give the date of collection in the form "ddmmyy", the next two characters give information about the receiver channels in use, followed by a load of numbers that give sequence number data, finally there is the "_x", this is the replicant number for the task. Each task is initially sent out to to two people, with the replicant numbers "_0" and "_1", if for any reason a task is resent this number is incremented - the normal maximum is ten (replicant "_9").

There are currently two "types" of task "Multi-Beam", these are the vast majority of tasks we process, and "AstoPulse". The analysis performed on these is slightly different. AstroPulse task files are approximately 8MB long, while Multi-Beam files are approximately 330kB long, the overlap between tasks is proportionately much larger for Multi-Beam than AstroPulse.

You will see, as you roam around the forum reference to "tapes", this is a historical reference to the way the data used to get back from the telescope to the SETI servers = of 50GB tapes - it now comes back as 50GB files on hard disks. These tapes are "split" twice, once to produce the Astopulse data, and once to produce the Multi-Beam data.

That should get you started, or give you a headache, or both!

---

Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Welcome aboard.
Here are some links to help you get started.

You might want to read this one first.
> For navigating the BOINC Manager:
Advanced view - BOINC

> For more in-depth descriptions on the "types" of tasks that rob smith mentioned:
From the top of the home page of SETI@home, select either "About SETI@home", or "About Astropulse."

> General Q & A:
Guide: FAQ on BOINC