It has been a decade since I last crunched SETI@home via BOINC. How much has the science changed in the last 10 years? I saw the Breakthrough project on the news and wondered if this meant SETI@home was getting work from some new telescopes other than the original Arecibo.

Does SETI@home now have work from other telescopes, if so which ones and how often are work units sent out?

Many thanks

SETI@Home does get work from (at least) one other telescope. It comes through to us in the same way as the Arecibo data, but is identified by the file name starting "blc" instead of a date (Aercibo multibeam) or "ap" (Arecibo astropulse).

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

Great news, thanks for the confirmation that we get work units from Green Bank telescope. Does the SETI@home app do exactly the same analysis on these work units as it does for those from Arecibo or does it do some different computations?

Exactly the same application is used for both Arecibo & GBT data

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

Adding to Chris' comment about post-processing (Nebula), there has been one additional algorithm introduced into the multibeam process chain "Auto-correlation". This is a new way of looking for peaks/spikes that in certain circumstances is more discriminating than the old FFT based techniques

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

Many thanks for all the replies. I have now seen 2 or 3 blc work units.

One of the reasons I stopped 10 years ago was that only Arecibo was used and things got a little repetitive.

p.s. what does it mean when the work unit has vlar at the end? Just been sent loads of 'em and estimated time to process is much, much longer than other work units.

Very Low Angle Range - during the scan the telescope is normally moving quite slowly, sometimes it is moving VERY slowly, normally this is to look at a particular point in the sky. Very often the processing of them will take longer than a "normal" task - as you have discovered.

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

On a related note, I get AstroPulse workunits only very rarely. Are you seeing the same thing (or is my computer deemed too old to handle them)?

Astropulse (AP) tasks are very rare. Mainly because the Arecibo data we are getting is old and has most of it already been processed using the the AP application. Currently there are no AP splitters capable of working on the BLP data. When they get a few AP splitters capable of working with the BLP data I would expect to see APs coming out, and the BLP data we have already processed being re-split to allow us to process using the AP application.

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

I guess the thing that has changed most for me from ten years ago is the speed of home PCs. At my peak ten years ago my best day according to BOINC stats was 1,270 credits and that was using several PCs. Today it is showing my RAC at nearly three times that value and that is using just one PC.

I wonder what all the projects make of all this extra processing time, there does not seem to be that many new projects and a few old favourites have disappeared so must be lots more processing power available to the projects.

In a similar vein it took me about two and half years to get to my first million - now it's taking me about two and half days to do a million.

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