News archive

SETI@home papers accepted for publication

Two papers on SETI@home will be published in The Astronomical Journal, a well-regarded scientific journal:

  • SETI@home: Data Acquisition and Front-End Processing describes SETI@home's data recorder, splitter, and client program. It covers the five detection types, their parameters and statistics, and the algorithm for finding them.

  • SETI@home: Data Analysis and Findings describes the back end (Nebula) and its results: RFI removal, candidate finding and ranking. It explains how artificial signals, or 'birdies', were used to optimize algorithms and estimate overall sensitivity.

    For details, see an entry in the Nebula blog.

    • 18 Jun 2025, 3:23:30 UTC · Discuss

    Website outage
    Multiple disk failure resulted in a web site outage. We think we've recovered almost everything from the web site, so it should be back up and running.
    3 Apr 2025, 20:49:48 UTC · Discuss

    RIP Jimmy Carter
    Carter wrote the following on June 16, 1977 and placed it in Voyager 1, which is the most distant human-made object from Earth:

    This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human being among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.

    We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some – perhaps many – may have inhabited planet and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

    “This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problem we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.”

    --- Jimmy Carter, President of the United States of America, the White House, June 16, 1977
    30 Dec 2024, 9:27:36 UTC · Discuss

    Nebula progress report
    Check out our latest newsletter: Final update.
    3 Mar 2023, 4:59:42 UTC · Discuss

    Citizen Science SETI Project at UCLA.
    Jean Luc Margot, a SETI Researcher at UCLA has started a Citizen Science project at UCLA. Participants will help identify and classify types of Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) seen in the data that they have taken at the Green Bank Telescope. This is an important step in identifying any signals that don't look like RFI.

    You can join at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/ucla-seti-group/are-we-alone-in-the-universe.
    15 Feb 2023, 19:40:18 UTC · Discuss

    RIP Frank Drake
    We are sad to report that SETI pioneer and originator of the Drake Equation passed away on September 2nd. Frank at the age of 92. Frank conducted the first SETI experiments capable of detecting radio signals at nearby stars distances, He continued to be a large influence on the field into his 90s.

    Dan Werthimer had this to say:

    If it weren't for Frank, I'd be filthy rich. When the first microcomputer chips came out in the early 70's I joined the Homebrew Computer Club, along with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Everybody in Homebrew became ultra-rich, except me.

    While other homebrewers were designing and selling the first home computers, I spent my time figuring out how to utilize the first computer chips for SETI experiments, thanks to Frank. I didn't become rich, but instead I was inspired by Frank to work on some of the most fundamental questions we have as humans. He taught me so much - I was incredibly fortunate to work with Frank on many SETI experiments for 45 years. Frank's insights led to optical SETI, SETI@home, and most recently, while in his 90's, Frank helped pioneer PANOSETI.

    Frank was a wonderful friend, mentor, and brilliant collaborator. If Earthlings ever find ET, we'll have Frank to thank.

    4 Sep 2022, 22:04:33 UTC · Discuss

    Another bittersweet milestone.
    We're cleaning out our lab at Space Sciences, and saying goodbye to a lot of history.
    31 Mar 2022, 18:58:41 UTC · Discuss

    Nebula progress report
    Check out our latest newsletter: New zones, a milestone, and next steps.
    21 Nov 2021, 21:14:44 UTC · Discuss

    Nebula progress report
    Check out our latest newsletter: Finding a Pulse.
    28 Sep 2021, 8:31:19 UTC · Discuss

    Nebula progress report
    Another in the All in the Timing series.
    4 Aug 2021, 0:54:22 UTC · Discuss

    Nebula progress report
    ... wherein it's asserted that we're in the home stretch.
    12 Jul 2021, 2:15:34 UTC · Discuss

    Nebula progress report
    Check out recent advances in drifting RFI removal.
    10 Jun 2021, 21:20:45 UTC · Discuss

    Nebula progress report
    Check out recent data analysis progress: Reobservation and drifting RFI.
    24 Apr 2021, 19:43:58 UTC · Discuss

    Birdies and drifting RFI
    Check out the latest entry in the Nebula Blog.
    25 Feb 2021, 23:09:29 UTC · Discuss

    Nebula progress
    Read about recent progress in our back-end data analysis: Taking the long view
    21 Jan 2021, 5:59:34 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home talk today
    David Anderson will give a talk on SETI@home for the Zoom meeting of the Steel City ARC, today at 7:30 PM Eastern time. UPDATE: a recording of the talk is here.
    13 Jan 2021, 21:07:18 UTC · Discuss

    Nebula update
    Check out All in the Timing III, a rundown on recent progress in back-end data analysis.
    22 Dec 2020, 4:10:31 UTC · Discuss

    Bryon Leigh Hatch and Arecibo have passed on.
    We got two pieces of really bad news yesterday. Byron Leigh Hatch, founder of the Carl Sagan team, all around smart and thoughtful guy, and a setizen since shortly after SETI@home began in 1999, passed away in August. There is a thread for leaving remembrances here. He will be missed.

    And, of course, we were informed of the collapse of the elevated structure at Arecibo. It was clear after the second cable broke, the structure would come down soon. As much as we were unhappy that the repair efforts had to be abandoned because of the danger, it's clear now that it was the right call. It's our hope that we will find national support for building new scientific facilities on Puerto Rico in the near future.
    2 Dec 2020, 18:59:36 UTC · Discuss

    Encouraging progress in back-end data analysis
    Check out Good non-barycentric news, a summary of recent work in Nebula.
    23 Nov 2020, 9:52:01 UTC · Discuss

    Update on back-end data analysis
    Work continues on Nebula: read about Finding persistent non-barycentric signals (work in progress).
    1 Nov 2020, 8:22:32 UTC · Discuss

    Nebula-related news
    Read the latest installment of the Nebula blog: Observations on observation.
    8 Jun 2020, 3:24:06 UTC · Discuss

    External design review
    We met with a group of outside experts to review some of our back-end algorithms. It was a productive meeting.
    22 May 2020, 5:03:17 UTC · Discuss

    Nebula progress and non-progress
    The last data has been sent out, but our work on Nebula - the final phase of data analysis - is picking up steam. However, not all ideas are good ideas. Read about Multiplet scoring: back to the drawing board.
    26 Apr 2020, 3:58:12 UTC · Discuss

    Final data is in the splitter queue.
    As promised, we've stopped the process that puts new data into the queue today. Data distribution will continue until the files shown on the status pages are done. We'll be accepting results and resending results that didn't validate for a while.
    31 Mar 2020, 16:23:54 UTC · Discuss

    Jim_S has passed away.
    We are saddened to report that former moderator and long-term friend of SETI@home Jim Scott passed away unexpectedly this morning. Angela has started a thread where people can post their memories of Jim and offer condolences.
    29 Mar 2020, 1:58:47 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home and COVID-19
    SETI@home will stop distributing tasks soon, but we encourage you to continue donate computing power to science research - in particular, research on the COVID-19 virus. The best way to do this is to join Science United and check the "Biology and Medicine" box.
    23 Mar 2020, 21:33:54 UTC · Discuss

    New SETI Perspectives: "How did life begin on Earth and elsewhere?"
    Richard Lawn has posted a new SETI Perspective entitled How did life begin on Earth and elsewhere?.
    19 Mar 2020, 22:49:24 UTC · Discuss

    Nebula: science goals
    If we don't find ET, our secondary goal is to quantify the sensitivity of the search. Read about
    some ideas about how we can do this in the Nebula blog.
    7 Mar 2020, 4:44:49 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home hibernation
    On March 31, the volunteer computing part of SETI@home will stop distributing work and will go into hibernation.

    We're doing this for two reasons:

    1) Scientifically, we're at the point of diminishing returns; basically, we've analyzed all the data we need for now.

    2) It's a lot of work for us to manage the distributed processing of data. We need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results we already have, and writing this up in a scientific journal paper.

    However, SETI@home is not disappearing. The web site and the message boards will continue to operate. We hope that other UC Berkeley astronomers will find uses for the huge computing capabilities of SETI@home for SETI or related areas like cosmology and pulsar research. If this happens, SETI@home will start distributing work again. We'll keep you posted about this.

    If you're currently running SETI@home on your computer, we encourage you to attach to other BOINC-based projects as well. Or use Science United and sign up to do astronomy. You can stay attached to SETI@home, of course, but you won't get any jobs until we find new applications.

    We're extremely grateful to all of our volunteers for supporting us in many ways during the past 20 years. Without you there would be no SETI@home. We're excited to finish up our original science project, and we look forward to what comes next.
    2 Mar 2020, 21:16:23 UTC · Discuss

    Low available work.
    For a couple of reasons, the result table has grown to the point where it no longer fits in main memory. That has been slowing the validators and assimilators, which is causing the result table to grow further.

    We'd like to get it down to a manageable size before our Tuesday outage. To that end we are throttling work generation to a rate at which the table size is shrinking. We hope that this rate will increase as the table gets smaller.

    So for the next few days work will be hard to come by (but not zero).
    18 Jan 2020, 18:51:01 UTC · Discuss

    Why do people run SETI@home?
    Check out Stars in Their Eyes?, a research paper from the University of Geneva about why people run SETI@home.
    16 Jan 2020, 3:49:24 UTC · Discuss

    A new fundraiser for SETI storage!
    Mr. Kevvy and the GPU Users Group have graciously convened a fundraiser to help modernize our aging storage infrastructure. Thank you Mr. Kevvy and GPUUG!
    30 Dec 2019, 17:35:45 UTC · Discuss

    Some server issues today...
    It's the Friday before a holiday week and the servers know it.

    The file system containing the beta project uploads directory is having problems, so beta is down until further notice.

    This problem may be affecting the rate at which the main project can handle results, so the validation and assimilation queues are getting large, which may affect the rate of work generation.
    20 Dec 2019, 17:10:04 UTC · Discuss

    New paper on observing "Clarke Exo-belts"
    Dr. Korpela and his colleagues Prof. Shauna Sallmen and Ms. Kaisa Crawford-Taylor have published a new paper today in the Astronomical Journal about whether astronomers be able to detect belts of satellites circling planets around other stars. Unfortunately, the answer is that even the thickest satellite belts will be very difficult to see with current technology. Even the James Webb Space Telescope will find it difficult.

    If, like most sentient beings in the Galaxy, you don't have a subscription to the Astronomical Journal you can see a preprint of the article at arXiv.org.
    4 Dec 2019, 19:44:43 UTC · Discuss

    Fall/Winter 2019 Funding drive has started
    We've started our 2019 funding drive. Many of you have probably received our email penned by Jeff Cobb who has been in the SETI group longer than I have. If you can't wait, you can read yours here.

    Because of our continued effort to be GDPR compliant, we're not sending emails to anyone with an EU/EAA email addresses, anyone who listed an EU/EAA country, or anyone who listed "International" as their country. And, of course, anyone who has opted out of our emails won't get them.

    Thanks for your support!
    28 Nov 2019, 22:00:33 UTC · Discuss

    New SETI Perspectives: "Is ET in Our Solar System?"
    Richard Lawn has posted a new SETI Perspectives entitled "Is ET in Our Solar System?"
    27 Nov 2019, 4:43:58 UTC · Discuss

    New Nebula progress report
    Check out All in the Timing, a report on recent progress in SETI@home's back-end data analysis.
    4 Nov 2019, 21:55:27 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home news for Alexa
    SETI@home member Morris Penasso has developed a SETI@home News "skill" for Amazon Alexa/Echo that can tell you the latest from our news feed.
    You can get it here.
    18 Oct 2019, 16:57:08 UTC · Discuss

    Servers Remain Up During Power Outage
    Large swaths of Northern California, including the UC Berkeley Campus, are under a Public Safety Power Shutoff due to high winds and the associated wildfire risks. Our servers are located in the campus Data Center which is protected by a high capacity UPS. We expect that our servers will remain up for the duration of the outage. Thus far Internet connectivity also remains up although this depends on factors outside of the Data Center.
    10 Oct 2019, 16:57:08 UTC · Discuss

    New SETI Perspectives: "What to expect from ET?"
    Richard Lawn has posted another interesting article to "SETI Perspectives". This one is titled What to expect from ET? .
    28 Aug 2019, 17:15:08 UTC · Discuss

    Dan Werthimer wins 2019 Carl Sagan Prize.
    Congratulations to our own Dan Werthimer for winning the 2019 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization! The Sagan Prize is presented specifically to recognize and encourage researchers who “have contributed mightily to the public understanding and appreciation of science.” You can read more about the Sagan Prize and see past winners at http://wonderfest.org/sagan-prize/ .
    25 Aug 2019, 19:55:37 UTC · Discuss

    2019 SETI.Germany Wow! anniversary event: 15-29 August
    Every year SETI.Germany organizes an event in honor of the anniversary of the Wow! signal. This year's event (the 42nd anniversary) takes place from 15 to 29 August . Further information can be found here .
    22 Jul 2019, 23:13:46 UTC · Discuss

    New SETI Perspectives: "Seeing the Unseeable: The Black Hole Image"
    Richard Lawn has posted another interesting article to "SETI Perspectives". This one is titled Seeing the Unseeable: The Black Hole Image and is about the Event Horizon Telescope's image of the black hole in M87.
    5 Jul 2019, 21:10:42 UTC · Discuss

    Article on SETI@home's 20th anniversary
    An article by Ben Lindbergh in The Ringer discusses the history and status of SETI@home as it turns 20.
    25 May 2019, 13:45:15 UTC · Discuss

    20 years and counting!
    Happy Anniversary! On this date in 1999, SETI@home came online. Since then millions of our volunteers have helped us sift through petabytes of data from multiple radio telescopes. ET still hasn't shown up to the party.

    We're not discouraged. We're able to examine less than a tenth of a percent of the radio spectrum, over only 1/3 of the sky and a limited number of additional stars. But our capabilities are increasing every day. In 1999 it took up to a week to process a single workunit on a home PC. Now, on a machine with a GPU, it might only take a few minutes to do a far more detailed and more sensitive analysis. Who knows what the next 20 years will bring?
    17 May 2019, 17:39:43 UTC · Discuss

    SETI Perspectives article "Coming of Age for Optical SETI"
    Richard Lawn has written a new article, this one on the Panoramic Optical SETI effort, PANOSETI. As a bonus he includes a bit of an update on 'Oumuamua.
    10 May 2019, 18:52:19 UTC · Discuss

    Science progress report
    An update on the SETI@home back-end data analysis is here.
    30 Apr 2019, 22:05:21 UTC · Discuss

    Long Outage Today
    We had to recover the master database on oscar from a backup taken today on carolyn. Oscar is now back to being the master DB and carolyn is once again the replica DB. Things will be a bit slow as the database becomes resident in memory.
    10 Apr 2019, 0:57:56 UTC · Discuss

    The Drake Equation Revisited
    Richard Lawn has given us a new SETI Perspectives article to think about. This one is about the Drake Equation.
    4 Apr 2019, 18:39:35 UTC · Discuss

    Another crash
    This time the primary database machine crashed and hasn't automatically recovered. We've fallen back to the replica machine, and the only symptom should be a few extra hours of outage.

    I'm glad we have the replica.
    3 Apr 2019, 0:14:23 UTC · Discuss

    New SETI Perspectives article
    Richard M Lawn has posted another interesting article to the SETI Perspectives forum. This one is about the mysteries of Fast Radio Burst (aka FRBs), possibly some of the most distant explosions ever seen.
    12 Mar 2019, 21:18:25 UTC · Discuss

    We're back up.
    Hopefully there won't be any further problem.

    Our attempt to upgrade the memory on Oscar (the BOINC database machine) and Carolyn (the replica database) took a bit of DIMM swapping to find pairs of DIMMs that worked. Carolyn is still short two DIMMs (32 GB), but we didn't want to extend the outage any further to try to get it up to the full 192 GB.

    We might try to max out Carolyn during the outage next week.

    [edit]And as is usual after a long outage, we've got a large number of hosts out there starving for work. It'll take a little while before "no work" messages start to get less frequent.[/edit]
    7 Mar 2019, 0:51:29 UTC · Discuss

    Download server glitch
    We had a problem with one of our download servers that was slowing down downloads and slowing down work generation. We've fixed the problem, but there are lots of people out there trying to download. It'll probably be a while before our downloads aren't swamped with requests.

    Work ready to send has started trending back up, so we shouldn't end up with a work shortage.
    1 Mar 2019, 21:00:09 UTC · Discuss

    New forum, and a new contributor.
    We have added a new forum called SETI Perspectives that will showcase thoughts on SETI and related topics from people not directly connected with the Berkeley SETI group. Richard Lawn, Ph.D is our first contributor with an article about 'Oumuamua, the first object we've seen that convincingly originates from outside from outside the solar system. We hope have a long collaboration with Richard. Please welcome him into the SETI@home family.
    23 Feb 2019, 23:29:56 UTC · Discuss

    Setizen Gordon Lowe has passed away
    I'm sad to report that we've lost another long time SETI@home volunteer and moderator Gordon MacKenzie Lowe. A remembrance thread has been started here.

    Gordon will be greatly missed.
    21 Feb 2019, 16:35:04 UTC · Discuss

    BOINC Open Source Project looking for experienced MacOS developers
    The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) system is the software infrastructure used by Einstein@Home and many other volunteer distributed computing projects. The BOINC Open Source Project is looking for volunteers to develop and maintain the BOINC client on macOS. The BOINC Client and Manager are C++ cross-platform code supporting Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, and several other operating systems. We currently have a number of volunteer developers supporting Windows and Linux, but our main macOS developer is winding down his involvement after many years. He is prepared to help a few new macOS developers get up to speed.

    If you have macOS development experience and are interested in volunteering time to help support and maintain the BOINC macOS client please have a look at the more detailed description here: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/MacDeveloper

    If you want to help, please sign up to the BOINC Developer email list here: ​https://groups.google.com/a/ssl.berkeley.edu/forum/#!forum/boinc_dev.

    If you are not a macOS developer, but have other skills and are interested in contributing to BOINC, the link above also has more general information.

    Thank you!
    20 Feb 2019, 17:47:19 UTC · Discuss

    Storage machine crash....
    A machine that was holding 15% of our outgoing workunits has crashed and refuses to start back up. Short term it means that attempts to access those workunits will cause an error until the workunit is marked as bad.

    Sorry for the incovenience.
    8 Feb 2019, 21:34:28 UTC · Discuss

    Slow server for the next 8 hours or so...
    GeorgeM, the machine that holds the data that you download, decided that it was time to verify that the RAID array is in good shape. That will slow down disk access until the verify procedure is complete. The main effect is slowing down the rate at which work can be created. It's likely that we'll run out of work in the next hour or so. Things should recover automatically when it's done.
    30 Jan 2019, 3:33:02 UTC · Discuss

    Little bits of previously unfinished data.
    You may have noticed occasional bits of data from years past showing up in your queue. While running a completeness check I noticed some files that had never been completely analyzed. Some may have fallen through the cracks. Some may just be bad data that never made it through the splitters. I'm going to trickle them into the queue when the Arecibo queue is empty, just in case.
    11 Jan 2019, 18:28:11 UTC · Discuss

    Science database crash...
    We had a minor science database crash today that brought work generation to a halt. Everything appears to be OK with no data losses. We should [be] entirely back up at this point, but I'll keep checking things out.
    7 Jan 2019, 0:17:40 UTC · Discuss

    Weekly Outage on Wednesday This Week and Next
    Because of the Christmas and New Years Day holidays, our weekly outage will be on Wednesday rather than the normal Tuesday both this week and next.
    24 Dec 2018, 20:00:49 UTC · Discuss

    Report from the NASA Technosignatures Workshop released.
    The report from the NASA Technosignatures Workshop has been uploaded to arxiv.org. You can find it here if you are looking for some light reading.
    21 Dec 2018, 21:49:24 UTC · Discuss

    Fall/Winter 2018 Funding Drive has started.
    We've started our 2018 funding drive. Many of you have probably received our email penned by one of our undergraduate researchers. If you can't wait, you can read yours here.

    Because we're not yet fully GDPR compliant, we're not sending emails to anyone with an EU/EAA email addresses, anyone who listed an EU/EAA country, or anyone who listed "International" as their country. And, of course, anyone who has opted out of our emails won't get them.

    Thanks for your support!
    18 Nov 2018, 19:42:13 UTC · Discuss

    Account deletion enabled...
    We've finally got the BOINC account deletion feature installed and enabled. Account deletion cannot be undone. You'll also need your password and a valid email address for identity verification.

    You can access it from your account settings on the web site.
    10 Nov 2018, 2:56:08 UTC · Discuss

    NASA Technosignatures Workshop Webcast
    NASA TV will be livestreaming the Technosignatures workshop at this URL. The workshop is about the numberous ways we could search for extraterrestrial technologies. Many of the Berkeley SETI personnel will be speaking today (Wednesday). The agenda can be found here
    26 Sep 2018, 12:36:22 UTC · Discuss

    Nebula updates
    The development of Nebula, the second and final stage of SETI@home data analysis, has made slow but steady progress. Check out the latest progress report: Improved multiplet-finding.
    21 Sep 2018, 8:25:35 UTC · Discuss

    SETI.Germany Wow! event: 15-29 August
    Every year SETI.Germany organizes an event in honor of the 41th Anniversary of the Wow! signal. This year's event takes place from 15 to 29 August . Further information can be found here .
    6 Aug 2018, 20:30:01 UTC · Discuss

    Revised scale of significance of ET detection published.
    A group of SETI astronomers led by Duncan Forgan, and including myself and BSRC director Andrew Siemion, has published a revised version of the Rio Scale. The Rio Scale is designed to predict the public impact a signal would have, like the Richter scale does for earthquakes. The prior version of the Rio scale, in addition to being rarely used, tended to overestimate the impact of low quality or low significance reports of detection.

    Now all we have to do is convince other SETI astronomers and the press to use it.

    There is a related article at GeekWire.

    A calculator for Rio 2.0 scores in now available here.
    25 Jul 2018, 15:47:05 UTC · Discuss

    "Are we alone?" on VICE
    The HBO series VICE will be broadcasting an episode with a segment entitled "Are we alone?" starting June 1 at 11pm EST. It will be available on HBO streaming service, HBO GO, at 7:30pm EST.

    The segment includes interviews with the father of modern SETI, Frank Drake, and a SETI@home volunteer, John Fluth, who has been a part of the project nearly as long as I have. We'll be interested in seeing your reaction to this piece.

    Trailers are available through facebook and twitter.
    30 May 2018, 5:03:57 UTC · Discuss

    Dropped packets
    The UC data center switched over to a new firewall this morning. Since then packets into and out of the data center have been suffering drops. The Data Center staff is debugging the problem, we'll probably be dropping packets until it's resolved.
    30 Apr 2018, 17:23:04 UTC · Discuss

    Unexplained database slowness
    The database has gotten hung up a couple of times with slow queries. I've restarted it once and that seems to have helped. It'll take several hours to be sure.

    If that didn't solve the problem, it probably means the index the server uses to choose workunits to send has gotten corrupted. If I need to rebuild it, we'll probably be down most of tomorrow while I do so.
    31 Mar 2018, 6:11:01 UTC · Discuss

    Slow network connection to Green Bank
    Something is happening to the network connection between Green Bank and Berkeley that is slowing down the rate at which we can transfer data for splitting. We've opened a trouble ticket with campus networking services. Hopefully they will be able to find and fix the problem quickly. Until then, work may be in short supply.
    29 Jan 2018, 18:45:35 UTC · Discuss

    Long outage...
    The outage ran long today because we needed to run down to the data center to swap some bad drives with new ones and reboot a few of the machine to pick up kernel and mysql updates.

    Sorry for the delay.
    24 Jan 2018, 7:17:44 UTC · Discuss

    Projects are (no longer) down
    Our upload server is malfunctioning. The projects are down until we can fix this.
    4 Jan 2018, 20:04:53 UTC · Discuss

    Now accepting donations of gridcoin.
    Because of several requests, I've resurrected the idea that we could take donation in gridcoin, a cryptocurrency you can earn by participating in volunteer computing projects.

    Our gridcoin address is now listed on our donation page.
    13 Dec 2017, 18:41:43 UTC · Discuss

    Special Fundraiser for Parkes Data Store and GPU development system
    Thanks to our collaboration with Breakthrough Listen and their international colleagues, we will soon have the ability to access data recorded at the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia. For the first time, this will give us full-sky coverage, including the southern hemisphere, in our search for ET. However, due to the enormous amount of data that the 13-beam receiver at Parkes can generate, we will require extra hardware to store and distribute it. We need your help to purchase this.

    Thanks to some special offers, one from the Hanson family in memory of Robert W. & Mary P. Hanson, one from Richard Haselgrove in memory of his mother, Jenifer Leech, and one from Mr. Kevvy, we have the possibility to match donations which will allow us to purchase the Parkes Data store server (~$34K) and the GPU development systems (~$10K) we will need for the coming year. For every dollar you donate in this special fund raiser, Mr. Kevvy will match it, the Hanson Family will match it with two, and Richard Haselgrove will match it with two more. That means for every dollar you donate we'll get six dollars towards the purchase of these servers!

    Because this is a special fundraiser we'll have special notation on your account page and on the forums. The 12TB disk drives in the Parkes Data Store cost $450. One sixth of that is $75. So, a donation of $75 or more gets you a disk drive icon. The GPUs in the GPU development machine that we will be using for our recording systems at future telescopes are $1500 each, so a donation of $250 or more will get you a GPU icon. And as always, any donation of $10 or more will get you a green star.

    But in the end, it's not about the icons: it's about getting the data and making a discovery for the ages. Your help, whether by crunching data or by donating, is always appreciated.
    7 Dec 2017, 19:15:11 UTC · Discuss

    Splitters off, again :(
    I had to turn the splitters off, again. I underestimated the rate at which we were creating work (damn moveable decimal points!). I thought we could go without adding more space to the database until we had time (tomorrow morning) to delete the old database spaces.

    I was wrong, we really zoomed through the files on disk, and we ran out of space. Deleting database spaces is dangerous, so I really want Jeff to check the command script before it gets run. That won't happen until morning. But once it does we'll be back in operation.

    Hopefully most SETIzens won't even notice this short absence of work.
    6 Dec 2017, 5:39:31 UTC · Discuss

    Berkeley SETI Research Center undergraduate research internships, summer 2018
    Applications are invited for 10-week paid undergraduate research internships at Berkeley SETI Research Center for summer 2018. BSRC is a
    world-leader in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence – the quest for a scientific answer to one of humanity’s oldest questions: Are we
    alone in the Universe? Housed in the Astronomy Department at the University of California, Berkeley, the team at BSRC leads the science
    program for the $100-million Breakthrough Listen project. Our scientists and engineers are pioneers in the development of software,
    instrumentation, and science strategy for the search for intelligent life on other worlds. We have access to substantial amounts of time on
    the planet’s largest telescopes, connections to leading players in industry, and we’re based in one of the world’s premiere astronomy
    research institutions. We’re also psyched that we get to wake up each day and hunt for aliens.

    Current sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates (including non-US citizens) studying at a degree-granting institution in the US are eligible to
    apply. Around 5 - 7 positions will be available. A stipend of $20 / hr (up to a maximum of $8000) will be provided. Details and links to the application form are at https://seti.berkeley.edu/Internship.html
    5 Dec 2017, 1:23:37 UTC · Discuss

    We're generating work again.
    It took a bit longer than I thought it would, but we're back online. It'll probably be a few days before we have a full ready-to-send queue.

    Now we can get back to finding ET.
    2 Dec 2017, 7:19:51 UTC · Discuss

    No work. Database issues.
    At first I thought the restart on Tuesday had solved our database problems. I guess I was wrong. It only fixed some of them.

    We've hit yet another hidden limit in our Informix science database. The good news is that we know how to fix this one. The bad news is it will take a little while.

    We don't have to wait for the full fix before starting to split again, but the point at which we can split will probably be sometime tomorrow. Until then, we only have a few re-dos and a little bit of astropulse to do.
    29 Nov 2017, 21:41:36 UTC · Discuss

    Richard Lubrich has passed away.
    Long time setizen, Richard Lubrich (Dr. C.E.T.I., aka Dr. SETI, aka nobody) passed away today. Richard was a fixture on the forums from our earliest days. He was a great friend to SETI@home and will be greatly missed.
    29 Nov 2017, 1:43:24 UTC · Discuss

    Database slowness
    We're having some as yet unexplained slowness with the our BOINC database. There don't seem to be any hardware issues. Temperatures are running normal and all the drives seem good. Yet for some reason the query that fills the "ready to send" queue is running about 10 times slower than it normally does.

    Until I get it fixed, it means that on average we're sending out 3 workunits a second rather than 30+.

    I'll let you know when I've got it figured out.
    11 Nov 2017, 0:09:26 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home 2017 fundraising drive has begun.
    We've started our annual fundraising drive to help raise the money we need to keep SETI@home running and expand it to new telescopes. Your computers provide us with the power to analyze this data, but your donations are an important part of keeping us operating.

    If you haven't yet received your fundraising letter, you can preview it here. You can donate at https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_donate.php.

    Thanks for keeping SETI@home going!
    3 Nov 2017, 17:29:31 UTC · Discuss

    BSRC Student Travel Fundraiser
    Berkeley SETI Research Center is holding a fundraiser to raise $7000 to send our student interns to conferences to present their work.

    We’ve been working with some great students at Berkeley SETI, and we’re optimistic that some of them will become the scientists and engineers who lead the field in future and maybe even find the signal we’re searching for. In the meantime they have been doing amazing work and we’d like to send them to academic conferences to present their results, and for their own professional development. If you would like to help with this effort, we are running a crowdfunding campaign at https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/SETItravel - every donation counts! We also have some fun perks including the chance to ask questions to members of the Berkeley SETI team, and to attend a party in our lab.

    Although this does not directly benefit SETI@home (our annual fundraiser will start in a couple weeks), it's a worthy cause. I'll be contributing!
    2 Oct 2017, 18:10:26 UTC · Discuss

    Arecibo Status
    I've been asked by several people to post a status update on the situation at Arecibo following hurricane Maria's passage.

    Unfortunately, at this point we haven't gotten any news. The last information we have is from a couple hours prior to when the eye passed Arecibo. That report said all the employees were accounted for and in sheltered buildings.

    Since then we've had no news. That's understandable. With power out on the whole island, electronics communications aren't going to be possible for some time. Heavy rains are still expected today, so I'm sure that the primary concern is still keeping everyone safe. Assessment of any damage will take time.

    Let's hope that everyone is safe, that their homes are intact, and that any damage can be repaired quickly.
    21 Sep 2017, 17:11:28 UTC · Discuss

    Data from "Tabby's Star" is flowing.
    For those who didn't recognize the name KIC8462852 in their work unit names, this data comes from GBT observations of Tabby's Star (aka Boyajian's Star, aka WTF-0001, aka the Weirdest star in the galaxy). This is not yet the full data set, which lives at Penn State, it's some test on-target/off-target observations that we're checking out.

    You might also notice another change. We've doubled the size of our work units which will reduce our quantization noise by 34%, and, depending on the strength of other noise sources, could give us as much as double that as a sensitivity increase.
    7 Sep 2017, 16:36:28 UTC · Discuss

    SETI.Germany Wow!-Event
    SETI.Germany is again organizing this Year's event in honor of the 40th Anniversary of the Wow! Signal. Further information can be found here. The event will run from Aug 15th, 4.00 UTC to Aug 29th 2017, 4.00 UTC.
    2 Aug 2017, 7:47:46 UTC · Discuss

    Interview with Green Bank scientist Ryan Lynch
    Ryan Lynch works on pulsar research at the Green Bank Observatory. In this video, we sat down with Ryan to chat about how to paint the world's largest steerable radio telescope, and what modern convenience he misses most while living in the middle of the National Radio Quiet Zone.

    https://youtu.be/fF9JaLyWuUI

    Follow us on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook @BerkeleySETI
    13 Jul 2017, 21:17:39 UTC · Discuss

    A 3D tour of the Green Bank Telescope.
    We took a GoPro Omni 360 VR camera up to the top of the Green Bank Telescope, the largest steerable radio telescope in the world. Join us on Part 1 of our journey, as we check out the telescope wheels that each carry more than a million pounds of weight, and learn about the 2004 individually controllable panels that make up the surface of the dish, which is larger than a football stadium.
    28 Jun 2017, 18:24:15 UTC · Discuss

    Help us improve RFI removal and scoring
    The SETI@home back end is getting closer to completion.


    At this point we need to manually scan lots of results, looking for cases where our algorithms don't seem to be working perfectly. If you like, you can help us with this.
    10 Jun 2017, 23:29:55 UTC · Discuss

    Jodrell Bank to partner with Breakthrough Initiatives
    At Berkeley SETI Research Center, we've long been friends and collaborators with Professor Michael Garrett and the team at Jodrell Bank. We're delighted to continue our collaboration as the Breakthrough Initiatives announce a formal partnership with Jodrell in the search for intelligent life beyond Earth: https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/News/11

    Although this partnership doesn't involve data from telescopes at Jodrell flowing to SETI@home (at least at the present time), the sharing of data, algorithms, and strategies will benefit the science programs at Berkeley and Jodrell, as well as at other telescopes involved in Breakthrough Listen and in SETI in general. You can seen an interview with Mike, recorded a few weeks back, at https://youtu.be/ZRMiuCFACCw, and take a 3D tour of the Lovell telescope and control room at Jodrell at https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=B8UZb1joxsG.

    For more news from Berkeley SETI, follow us on social media:
    http://facebook.com/BerkeleySETI
    http://twitter.com/BerkeleySETI
    http://youtube.com/BerkeleySETI
    31 May 2017, 22:46:20 UTC · Discuss

    Engadget article on SETI
    Engadget has published an article on SETI which includes discussion of Breakthrough Listen and SETI@home.
    28 May 2017, 18:10:59 UTC · Discuss

    New SETI@home web article in "The Atlantic"
    The Atlantic has published a new article entitled A Brief History of SETI@home featuring interviews of Dan Werthimer, David Anderson, and Eric Korpela.
    24 May 2017, 1:04:44 UTC · Discuss

    Dr. Steve Croft on Deep Astronomy
    Berkeley SETI's Steve Croft is joining other SETI and exoplanet researchers on Deep Astronomy right now (4 pm PDT, 2300 UTC). If you join live you can ask questions of these scientists.
    17 May 2017, 23:14:45 UTC · Discuss

    Free Speech and SETI@home
    Once again I need to explain our policies on free speech, as I've been getting lots of nastygrams both here and on twitter and facebook.

    First, let me explain our relationship to the UC Berkeley administration. Despite the fact that I met with the Chancellor once for about 15 seconds, the UC administration neither knows nor cares that SETI@home exists. Threats of quitting SETI@home or withholding donations will be about as effective as kicking a stray dog because you don't like something the dog catcher did. They won't notice. They don't care. They get no direct benefit from SETI@home, so here will be no effect on them, or the on University. We could shut off our servers tomorrow, and nobody in Sproul Hall would notice a thing.

    So here are our project commandments on free speech.

    0. Thine speech is free as in freedom, not free as in beer.
    1. Thou mayst speak thine mind.
    2. Thou shalt do so in the appropriate forum.
    3. Thou shalt recognize that speech has consequences to thine self and to others, some legal, some financial, some painful.
    4. Thou shalt not force others to pay for the delivery of or the consequences of speech they may not agree with.
    5. On public SETI@home forums, thou shalt use language a parent would not mind their 12 year old hearing.
    6. Failure to obey the forum rules will result in moderator action. If thou dost not understand, see thou commandment 4.

    In other words, if you want to be heard on the current controversy, try the Politics forum. Then use twitter, facebook, instagram and whatever social media you want. SETI@home in general and me in particular have no power to effect change of any sort.

    It sounds like there's still going to be a riot in Berkeley tomorrow because a group of white supremacists and a group of left wing anarchists are ignoring commandments 2, 3, and 4. The people of Berkeley and the people of California will be picking up the tab for their "freedom of speech" whether they want to or not. And personally, I think that's what's been missing from the whole discussion.
    27 Apr 2017, 3:50:26 UTC · Discuss

    Where we get the data
    Thanks for helping us analyze Breakthrough Listen data from the Green Bank Telescope! Berkeley SETI engineer Dave MacMahon takes us behind the scenes into the server room at Green Bank where the Listen instrument lives, and we also interview Green Bank director Karen O'Neil about keeping computers cool in our latest video: https://youtu.be/-gQocykdo1Y

    Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram @BerkeleySETI
    10 Apr 2017, 23:06:21 UTC · Discuss

    We're back online
    And with some incredible luck we didn't lose any entries in the pulse signal table at all.

    Whew!
    1 Apr 2017, 3:37:03 UTC · Discuss

    Unexpected outage (March 30-31)
    We've found some corruption in a part of our science database that holds the power vs time profiles of detected pulses. We're running some table checks to see if we can localize the problem and come up with a solution that minimizes the lost workunits that need to be redone.
    30 Mar 2017, 23:43:29 UTC · Discuss

    Science progress reports
    We're moving closer to completing the analysis of our 18 years of Arecibo data. Recent work has given us a good handle on RFI removal. See the Nebula blog for details.
    10 Mar 2017, 8:15:57 UTC · Discuss

    New SETI@home donation project on Bitcoin Utopia
    We've started a new mining effort on Bitcoin Utopia. If you've got mining equipment and want to help out, please join the effort.

    The ~5 bitcoins that were donated last year went primarily to buying replacement hard drives. With the number of drives we have running we lose quite a few over the course of a year. It was nice not to need to dip into cash to replace them.
    7 Jan 2017, 0:35:08 UTC · Discuss

    Problems with centurion
    We're having some problems with centurion, the computer holds the Breakthrough Listen data and does our Breakthrough Listen splitting. Correction will probably require an OS upgrade.

    Because of this GBT data will be scarce over the weekend.
    6 Jan 2017, 20:25:26 UTC · Discuss

    New Nebula blog
    A new blog documents the progress and status of Nebula, the SETI@home back end.
    2 Dec 2016, 8:12:59 UTC · Discuss

    Web site upgrade
    We changed the SETI@home web site to use Twitter Bootstrap, a CSS toolkit. This makes the site usable on small displays, and lets us use color schemes developed by other people (this one is called Darkly).
    25 Nov 2016, 21:43:52 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home Fall 2016 Fundraiser
    The SETI@home Fall 2016 fundraiser has begun. If you haven't received your fundraising letter you can find it here.

    The abundance of data has made our funding needs a little more demanding this year, so we're hoping you can help us out a bit more.

    As always, thanks for running SETI@home
    18 Nov 2016, 20:01:08 UTC · Discuss

    Celttooth has passed away.
    We are sad to report the passing to long time SETI contributor Celttooth (M. Ian Russell) We will be lessened by his absence.
    16 Nov 2016, 6:03:40 UTC · Discuss

    Nebula: Completing the SETI@home pipeline
    Read about Nebula, a new and faster back end for SETI@home. Nebula removes RFI and finds persistent signals. Its goal is to let us finish the current SETI@home experiment.
    7 Nov 2016, 21:48:28 UTC · Discuss

    Are aliens talking to us?
    WIRED interviewed Berkeley SETI Research Center's Steve Croft and Eric Korpela, and the SETI Institute's Seth Shostak, about one method we use to figure out whether claimed ETI signals are legit: https://www.wired.com/2016/10/aliens-trying-contact-use-handy-scale/
    Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube @BerkeleySETI
    14 Oct 2016, 17:51:18 UTC · Discuss

    Another probable non-detection of ET
    Dr. Korpela has posted his thoughts about the claimed detection of pulsed emission from extraterrestrial intelligence being beam at Earth from 234 different stars. He's not optimistic.

    The Breakthrough Listen project has also posted a statement of a similarly cautious tone.
    11 Oct 2016, 23:46:15 UTC · Discuss

    Replica database offline...
    The replica database will be offline until we can restore it from the primary database on tuesday (at the earlies). This will result in slowness of the web site and the scheduler.
    9 Oct 2016, 20:18:54 UTC · Discuss

    Behind the scenes at Berkeley SETI: Part II
    In our latest video, Berkeley SETI Research Center Engineer Dave MacMahon takes us into the server room and shows us some of the equipment that powers the search: https://youtu.be/WcTcQIVrskw

    Watch Part I of our interview with Dave at https://youtu.be/IOJ6-_gIyP0
    6 Sep 2016, 20:59:42 UTC · Discuss

    Breakthrough Listen observations of HD 164595
    The Breakthrough Listen team has posted their archival search for emission from HD 164595 and the initial analysis of their recent observations of that target.
    30 Aug 2016, 19:37:24 UTC · Discuss

    "Baffling" "signal" "from HD 164595" is probably none of the above.
    I'm sure that many of you have seen the news reports of a "SETI signal" detected from the star HD 164595

    I was one of the many people who received the the email with the subject "Candidate SETI SIGNAL DETECTED by Russians from star HD 164595 by virtue of RATAN-600 radio telescope." Since the email did come from known SETI researchers, I looked over the presentation. I was unimpressed. In one out of 39 scans that passed over star showed a signal at about 4.5 times the mean noise power with a profile somewhat like the beam profile. Of course SETI@home has seen millions of potential signals with similar characteristics, but it takes more than that to make a good candidate. Multiple detections are a minimum criterion.

    Because the receivers used were making broad band measurements, there's really nothing about this "signal" that would distinguish it from a natural radio transient (stellar flare, active galactic nucleus, microlensing of a background source, etc.) There's also nothing that could distinguish it from a satellite passing through the telescope field of view. All in all, it's relatively uninteresting from a SETI standpoint.

    But, of course, it's been announced to the media. Reporters won't have the background to know it's not interesting. Because the media has it, and since this business runs on media, everyone will look at it. ATA is looking at it. I assume Breakthrough will look at it. Someone will look at it with Arecibo, and we'll be along for the ride. And I'll check the SETI@home database around that position. And we'll all find nothing. It's not our first time at this rodeo, so we know how it works.
    29 Aug 2016, 17:50:30 UTC · Discuss

    Berkeley SETI Research Center Highlights
    We hope you enjoy this five minute highlight reel of some of our previous and upcoming videos. Hear about SETI@home and the Breakthrough Listen optical and radio searches, visit the Green Bank Telescope, see our computing hardware, and meet some of our undergraduate researchers: https://youtu.be/y0betLmOYhk

    Follow Berkeley SETI on Twitter: http://twitter.com/setiathome
    Facebook: http://facebook.com/BerkeleySETI
    Instagram: http://instagram.com/setiathome
    25 Aug 2016, 19:09:02 UTC · Discuss

    Setizen Jack Lass has passed away.
    The SETI@home team is sad to note the passing of long time SETI@home volunteer Jack Lass. Many of you will remember him from the original SETI@home forums. Our condolences go out to his wife and son. We will miss him.
    31 Jul 2016, 20:50:46 UTC · Discuss

    Behind the scenes at Berkeley SETI Research Center
    New video! BSRC engineer Dave MacMahon talks GPUs, FPGAs, and the hardware that powers the search https://youtu.be/IOJ6-_gIyP0
    27 Jul 2016, 23:57:27 UTC · Discuss

    SETI.German announces fifth Wow! event
    To celebrate the 39th anniversary of the Wow! signal, SETI.Germany is organizing a SETI@home crunching competition from Aug 15th to Aug 29th. Everyone is welcome!
    24 Jul 2016, 17:13:52 UTC · Discuss

    Vice Magazine article about Arecibo Closure
    Vice Magazine has posted an article about the potential closure of the Arecibo observatory.
    10 Jul 2016, 17:14:19 UTC · Discuss

    Breakthrough Listen: Expanding the Search for Life Beyond Earth
    BSRC's Dr. Steve Croft recently gave a one-hour public talk about how we find planets around other stars, the search for life beyond Earth, and the new Breakthrough Listen project. Watch the video at https://youtu.be/LJaQi8XYzRU

    Follow Berkeley SETI on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/BerkeleySETI
    and on Twitter: https://twitter.com/setiathome
    7 Jul 2016, 19:07:01 UTC · Discuss

    SETI researcher Stéphane Dumas has passed away
    We are sad to hear that our friend and colleague Stéphane Dumas passed away this week. Here is a video of his recent SETItalks talk.
    10 Jun 2016, 23:00:25 UTC · Discuss

    Arecibo still threatened with closure.
    Recently the NSF announced its intent to start the process which could lead to the partial shutdown, mothballing, or complete disassebly of the Arecibo Observatory. As most of you know, this is not a new discussion in the scientific community. Several years ago we had asked you write letters to Congress in hopes of averting this fate.

    A petition has been started on whitehouse.gov to ask the President to ensure it is funded. I'm pessimistic about the chances that it will change anything, as the President cannot change Congressional budget priorities, and only has limited ability to move money between NSF programs. However, bringing attention to the issues of science funding in this country cannot hurt.
    9 Jun 2016, 23:15:35 UTC · Discuss

    Berkeley SETI Research Center scientists profiled by Air and Space magazine
    BSRC's Dan Werthimer describes how our capabilities have improved by a factor of a trillion since the search began. http://www.airspacemag.com/space/new-seti-search-180959126/?no-ist
    25 May 2016, 21:29:11 UTC · Discuss

    Thanks for helping!
    We couldn't do any of this without you. Our search relies on the generosity of those who donate their computing resources and electricity, their coding skills, and also financial help to make what we do possible. Any and every contribution counts, and we appreciate all of you. While we are not funded by big government grants, we are fortunate to be based at one of the world's leading public universities, where one of our most precious resources is the bright young minds who will be the scientists and engineers leading the search in the years to come.

    So we invite you, if you feel motivated to do so, to help us with the resources to set up an undergraduate lab with new software-defined radio tools to help train our undergrads in the tools of the trade. To get an idea of how engaged these students are, check out our interview with Kyle at https://youtu.be/PIJ6TkM46wE. And if you'd like to support our work, please visit https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/1704. But whether or not you choose to contribute financially, we are so grateful for all of you that have chosen to be a part of SETI@home as we attempt together to answer humanity's biggest question. Thanks!
    25 Apr 2016, 19:03:11 UTC · Discuss

    Article about distribution of Breakthrough data.
    Inverse.com has published an article about our distribution of Breakthrough Listen data.
    15 Apr 2016, 0:01:13 UTC · Discuss

    Breakthrough Listen data now flowing.
    Happy Yuri's Night #55, the 55th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's historic first space flight on April 12, 1961.

    In celebration, we're starting distribution of Breakthrough Listen data from the Green Bank Telescope today. No intervention is necessary on your part. The main difference you will see is a change in your screen saver graphics, if you have them running. We'll still be distributing Arecibo data as well, so that won't change.

    The Breakthrough Initiative is also distributing raw data in multiple formats, so you can write your own analysis code if you'd like.

    You can read about it in this press release.
    12 Apr 2016, 18:04:28 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home 8 released for Raspberry Pi.
    It should also work on other ARM linux machines that use the gnueabihf ABI.
    8 Apr 2016, 22:36:22 UTC · Discuss

    Crowdfunding to support our undergrads
    We're raising money to support our undergrads to build hardware to search for ET. We'd love for you to help at https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/1704. Perks at the higher levels include a roundtable with BSRC Director Dr. Andrew Siemion, tours of our UC Berkeley labs, and a behind-the-scenes tour of the Green Bank Telescope. Or you can just bask in the warm fuzzy glow of helping out our undergrads. Every donation counts!
    8 Apr 2016, 1:50:35 UTC · Discuss

    Main web server crash / migration.
    Our main web server machine became inoperative this morning. We have migrated web service to another machine.
    19 Feb 2016, 21:54:14 UTC · Discuss

    Andrew Siemion talk at the SETI Institute
    BSRC Director Andrew Siemion will talk about Breakthrough Listen, SETI@home, follow-up of Tabby's Star, and other SETI programs at BSRC, Tuesday February 23 at noon, in Mountain View, CA. The talk is hosted by our friends at the SETI Institute​, and takes place at Microsoft Silicon Valley. To attend, please register for free tickets at http://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-breakthrough-initiative-listen-and-megastructures-at-kic-8463-tickets-19539745906?ref=ebtn

    For those of you unable to attend in person, SETI Institute talks are typically recorded and posted on YouTube about a week after the event.
    18 Feb 2016, 18:11:30 UTC · Discuss

    Educational materials on life in the Universe
    Berkeley SETI Research Center's Dr. Steve Croft, in collaboration with colleagues at UC Museum of Paleontology and the Space Sciences Laboratory's "Multiverse" education group have put together an educational site focusing on the conditions needed for life to arise in the Universe. Although aimed primarily at high school teachers and their students, this material may be of interest to broader audiences. In the "Research Profiles" section of the site you can also find an interview with BSRC's Dr. Eric Korpela, Director of SETI@home.

    http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/astrobio_01_intro
    10 Feb 2016, 19:53:55 UTC · Discuss

    New video: BSRC intern Kevin Luong
    Kevin Luong joined Berkeley SETI Research Center as an intern in summer 2015. Kevin worked with David Anderson to revise the NTPCKR system to run on cloud computing servers. There are still a few kinks to sort out, but if it works, this should let us run our data base through NTPCKR in a few weeks instead of more than a year. Kevin transferred to UCLA in the fall, but is continuing to work with SETI to explore cloud computing for other projects.

    We'll be launching an expanded undergraduate internship program soon. Details will be announced later this year.

    Watch the video at https://youtu.be/gR91rObbfqs
    22 Jan 2016, 20:51:10 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home Version 8 for Android and GPU to be released January, 21st
    I know everyone has been waiting. It's finally time.

    We need some Mac users with ATI Radeon HD4000 series card to help the beta test before we can release that version. So if you've got an HD4XXX GPU, please join the beta.
    21 Jan 2016, 1:57:50 UTC · Discuss

    Andrew Siemion at TEDxBerkeley
    BSRC Director Andrew Siemion is one of the featured speakers at TEDxBerkeley on Saturday, February 6. Details and tickets at http://tedxberkeley.org/portfolio-item/4162
    7 Jan 2016, 0:19:33 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home Version 8 has been released.
    SETI@home version 8 has been released. This version finally gives us the ability to process data from multiple sources, including the Green Bank Telescope. That means we'll be ready for data from Breakthrough Listen when it's available.

    We're releasing the versions for CPUs first. We'll release versions for graphics processing units (GPUs) and Android devices as they come available. We're releasing slowly so as not to overtax our download server. This update will happen automatically, unless you use a special version you got from another web site.

    We've also made small changed to our science code to improve the Gaussian fitting routines. This means version 8 results are not compatible with version 7. So if you use a version of SETI@home you got from another site, or if you compile your own version, you'll need to get or build a version 8 application. I'm sure link will be made available in the Number Crunching forum.

    A shout out to the volunteer developers (especially Urs, Jason and Raistmer) and all the beta testers for helping out.

    Happy New Year!
    1 Jan 2016, 17:59:48 UTC · Discuss

    UC Berkeley Big Give
    The University of California's big 24 hour fundraising extravaganza started Wednesday, November 18th at 9 pm and ends on Thursday, November 19th at 9 pm. If you'd like to make a donation to help SETI@home access our new data sources you can do so here.
    19 Nov 2015, 21:00:21 UTC · Discuss

    More on that weird Kepler star
    If KIC 8462852 really is harboring an advanced alien civilization, ought we to have seen something in existing radio surveys? Michael Garrett, director of ASTRON in the Netherlands, investigates:
    http://mikegarrett.blogspot.nl/2015/10/another-hint-that-kepler-system.html
    19 Nov 2015, 18:03:46 UTC · Discuss

    Meet Berkeley SETI Research Center's newest researcher
    Zuhra Abdurashidova started working at BSRC in June, and will be helping to get the Breakthrough Listen initiative running. You can see our interview with her at https://youtu.be/0GgDfJ7OMiA
    3 Nov 2015, 22:04:12 UTC · Discuss

    Did SETI@home ever find aliens?
    While still working our way through a lot of data, this article asks the question: Did SETI@home ever find aliens?
    30 Oct 2015, 16:13:45 UTC · Discuss

    Probably not aliens, but ...
    “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

    Read more about a strange star that has all of us in the SETI community intrigued. http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/the-most-interesting-star-in-our-galaxy/410023/
    15 Oct 2015, 17:19:54 UTC · Discuss

    Andrew Siemion testifies to United States Congress
    BSRC Director Andrew Siemion was called to testify to the US Congress about the search for life beyond Earth. Video at http://t.co/1spztN81Pe (Andrew's testimony starts at 28:49).
    30 Sep 2015, 19:27:37 UTC · Discuss

    Eric Korpela discusses alien contact.
    SETI@home Director Eric Korpela discusses alien contact in the MeanwhileInTheFuture podcast episode entitled "Greetings".
    21 Sep 2015, 16:21:27 UTC · Discuss

    There was a fire in the data center last night
    The entire data center (where our servers are) had to be shut down. That crisis is now over and we're carefully bringing our servers back up. See details here.
    19 Sep 2015, 18:30:31 UTC · Discuss

    The White House wants to hear about your experiences with citizen science.
    You can share your stories here here.
    16 Sep 2015, 1:48:09 UTC · Discuss

    Graduate student Lauren Weiss is searching for planets
    Graduate student Lauren Weiss is working with Berkeley SETI Research Center's Prof. Geoff Marcy, searching for Earth twins and exploring where life might be found in the Universe. Find out more in our latest video profile: https://youtu.be/7KG50exx_rg
    2 Sep 2015, 23:03:10 UTC · Discuss

    Latest SETI paper
    SETI@home Director Eric Korpela's most recent SETI paper "Modeling Indications of Technology in Planetary Transit Light Curves - Dark-side Illumination" (in collaboration with Prof. Shauna Sallmen) has been published by the Astrophysical Journal. A preprint is available at arXiv.
    27 Aug 2015, 16:08:47 UTC · Discuss

    Jack Hickish video profile
    Jack Hickish, a visiting scholar from Cambridge University, talks about how new technologies are transforming SETI, in our latest video profile. https://youtu.be/7UHnZxQq6GY
    25 Aug 2015, 20:59:59 UTC · Discuss

    Dan Werthimer radio interview
    Here's a one hour radio interview featuring Berkeley SETI Research Center's Dan Werthimer that aired on CBC radio last weekend. http://www.cbc.ca/1.3182903
    12 Aug 2015, 18:10:46 UTC · Discuss

    SETI.German announces fourth Wow! event
    To celebrate the 38th anniversary of the Wow! signal, SETI.Germany is organizing a SETI@home crunching competition from Aug 15th to Aug 29th. Everyone is welcome!
    7 Aug 2015, 21:24:41 UTC · Discuss

    work production off overnight
    The science database is down while we make a copy for offline data analysis. This is taking a bit longer than anticipated. During this period work production is off. We hope to resume work production tomorrow morning.
    7 Aug 2015, 2:18:00 UTC · Discuss

    Big boost for SETI@home from Yuri Milner's Breakthrough Listen Initiative
    SETI@home and Berkeley SETI Research Center are proud to be participating in the new Breakthrough Listen initiative, that will dramatically expand the search for life beyond Earth. http://nyti.ms/1KfWuYF
    20 Jul 2015, 15:01:40 UTC · Discuss

    David Anderson interview
    David Anderson, co-creator of SETI@home and Director of BOINC, took some time to chat with us recently.
    https://youtu.be/MHiUninQn18
    14 Jul 2015, 20:02:07 UTC · Discuss

    Matt Lebofsky on hacking your job, and managing SETI data
    Developer Matt Lebofsky is key to keeping SETI@home software & databases running. Check out our latest video profile of one of the guys who sends you your work units.
    https://youtu.be/nJirUUTIiiE
    6 Jul 2015, 18:29:25 UTC · Discuss

    Questions and Answers
    We put out a call on Twitter and Facebook for questions for our scientists and engineers. We picked seven of the submissions and had our team give short answers.

    https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx7CiYXTFBwjKF01pWr2IGMvgWazItXP3

    Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/setiathome
    Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/BerkeleySETI
    23 Jun 2015, 21:51:52 UTC · Discuss

    Eric Korpela on UFOs and Conspiracy Theories
    Berkeley SETI Research Center Project Scientist Eric Korpela talks about giant red aliens, sky queens, and what we'll do when we make contact. Check out our latest video profile at https://youtu.be/skhDicuJCwk
    12 Jun 2015, 18:20:35 UTC · Discuss

    The challenges of funding SETI
    Getting a steady stream of funding for SETI research is a challenge, as BSRC Director Andrew Siemion explains in this short video. https://youtu.be/jY5cQTKlYSs
    3 Jun 2015, 18:00:56 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@Andalucía
    Check out SETI@Andalucía, a new Spanish-language web site about SETI and SETI@home.
    21 May 2015, 17:55:05 UTC · Discuss

    Video interview with Seth Shostak from the SETI Institute
    Seth Shostak from the SETI Institute recently visited Berkeley SETI Research Center and took time to chat with us about challenges in the search (including funding!), as well as why he thinks we have a chance to detect ETI during the next couple of decades. Watch the four minute video at https://youtu.be/y66UBo12uOY
    18 May 2015, 17:53:34 UTC · Discuss

    Network Outage - Sunday May 17th
    On Sunday, May 17th campus is upgrading the network infrastructure at the facility hosting our servers. We will bringing the projects down for about 6-8 hours (starting at 8am, Pacific Time) to avoid complications during the upgrade.
    13 May 2015, 20:08:53 UTC · Discuss

    Shelley Wright: Is ET using infrared lasers to communicate?
    Shelley Wright, a former postdoctoral scientist in the UC Berkeley Astronomy Department, and now faculty at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, visited Berkeley SETI Research Center recently to talk about infrared and optical SETI, and how ET might be using huge lasers to communicate. Watch our four minute video interview at https://youtu.be/JoOkXhNUQO4
    11 May 2015, 17:16:48 UTC · Discuss

    "Dan Werthimer: Are We Alone?" Talk Video
    Did you know that at one time our best idea to contact ET was a 20 mile wide pit full of burning kerosene? SETI@home Chief Scientist Dan Werthimer gave a talk last Saturday on the history and current state of SETI. You can watch the video at https://youtu.be/F-I5fb2qKwU
    22 Apr 2015, 0:42:38 UTC · Discuss

    Summary of Berkeley SETI Research
    Here's a research poster by BSRC director Andrew Siemion from 2013 (but still mostly up to date) summarizing our group's work, including SETI@home.

    https://seti.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/seti_at_berkeley_2013.pdf

    We are currently working on deep cleaning one of our databases (see http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=77096), but we hope to have new work units out to your clients soon. Thanks for crunching!
    11 Apr 2015, 0:14:01 UTC · Discuss

    Workunit shortage
    Due to recent problems we are doing a deep cleaning of one of our larger databases. Update: though we are still working on the database, we were able to start workunit generation again over the weekend.
    9 Apr 2015, 21:51:20 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home World Visualization
    Check out this new animated map showing SETI@home data transmissions during a 5 minute period within the last 24 hours (updated regularly - click on image to view):

    1 Apr 2015, 22:21:05 UTC · Discuss

    False News Report
    Over the weekend a false news report from a known source of false news reports reported that we had detected an extraterrestrial signal. Of course, if we had, known sources of real news reports would also be carrying the story.

    In other words, no such luck.
    31 Mar 2015, 15:17:01 UTC · Discuss

    Berkeley SETI scientists using new techniques in ET search
    Prof. Shelley Wright from UC San Diego, working with members of the BSRC team including Dan Werthimer, Andrew Siemion, and Geoff Marcy, successfully achieved first light last weekend on a new instrument to search for pulses of infrared light from extraterrestrial intelligence. This exciting new area of research is highly complementary to our ongoing work using radio telescopes and SETI@home. Read more at http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressrelease/search_for_extraterrestrial_intelligence_extends_to_new_realms
    20 Mar 2015, 18:11:05 UTC · Discuss

    News from Berkeley SETI Research Center
    We'd like to keep you up to date with what's going on at Berkeley SETI Research Center! Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/BerkeleySETI and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/setiathome where you can find video interviews with Berkeley SETI Research Center staff, news items about our research, and more. We'll be linking to some of these posts via SETI@home client messages too.

    Our message board at http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_forum.php?id=908 will continue to post updates from the team including news items, server and database status updates, and other relevant topics, and you can participate in other forums at http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_index.php too.
    18 Mar 2015, 17:32:49 UTC · Discuss

    Astropulse is generating work again
    The databases are still being repaired, but we are now in a state where we can create new workunits and collect results.
    13 Mar 2015, 22:44:48 UTC · Discuss

    More on METI
    Dr. Korpela has posted slightly more detail of his thoughts on sending messages to ET.
    14 Feb 2015, 6:53:40 UTC · Discuss

    Android Version Checking
    The versions of SETI@home currently distributed can't run on Android 5+ (Lollypop). We're working on new versions.

    We've limited distribution to earlier distributions. If you can't get work on Android 4, it may be necessary to update your BOINC app.
    13 Feb 2015, 18:12:36 UTC · Discuss

    Statement on Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence/Active SETI
    In conjunction with other interested members of the SETI community, we've written a statement on beaming messages to other planets.

    The essence of the conclusion is that a few people shouldn't be making this decision for an entire planet.
    10 Feb 2015, 0:26:09 UTC · Discuss

    Prof. Charles Townes has passed away.
    We were saddened to learn that colleague Professor Charles Townes died this morning, January 27th, at the age of 99. A professor at UC Berkeley since 1967, Townes had a long and distinguished career, winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 for work that led to the development of the laser. He was active in research as recently as last year, making regular visits to his office at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, and to Mount Wilson Observatory where he worked to develop the Infrared Spatial Interferometer telescope. His broad research interests included the search for extraterrestrial intelligence - as co-author of a 1961 paper, he was one of the first to discuss interstellar communication using lasers. This gave rise to the rapidly growing field of optical SETI, including searches currently underway at UC Berkeley. Prof. Townes also served as an Advisory Board Member to the new Foundation for Investing in Research on SETI Science and Technology. We will miss him here at UC Berkeley, and send our condolences to his wife Frances and family.
    27 Jan 2015, 23:16:09 UTC · Discuss

    Marvin crashed
    It appears that the root partition filled on marvin (rapidly) while I was AFK, for no reason that I am aware of, which caused it to crash. Nobody is at the colocation facility right now, so the astropulse DB is down. I'll try to get remote accesses for a reboot, but chances are that marvin is down until monday morning.
    21 Dec 2014, 4:46:29 UTC · Discuss

    Own a piece of SETI history.
    Help SETI@home and own a piece of SETI@home history! Check out these auctions of SETI@home museum pieces
    17 Dec 2014, 22:54:18 UTC · Discuss

    Astropulse database fix is complete.
    Validators and assimilators and splitters are back on. New Astropulse work should be flowing soon.
    8 Dec 2014, 18:46:58 UTC · Discuss

    New Data from AO
    The four disks from AO have arrived - about 5TB of data. I have queued them up for pre-processing (radar blanking) so new SETI@Home workunits should be going out soon.
    5 Dec 2014, 17:54:33 UTC · Discuss

    Database Rebuild Status update.
    We've now inserted 231,770,000 of the 306,362,193 AstroPulse signals into the database. Over the last week the insert rate has slowly declined from 1.5 million per hour to 870,000 per hour. At that rate we're looking at another 86 hours (+24 for index building), which means Saturday morning (US Pacific time).

    On the plus side, Arecibo has four full drives of data that they can send us, so there might be SETI@home work before then if we're really lucky. I'll be posting updates in the Tech News forum through out the week.
    2 Dec 2014, 2:22:45 UTC · Discuss

    Status Update
    If you haven't been checking the tech news, here's the current status. We're rebuilding the Astropulse database. The current rate is an anemic 1.5 million rows per hour. There are 220 million rows left to do, which translates to 140 hours. Then I estimate it will take 24 hours to build the one remaining index necessary to create new work. That adds up to a week. I don't really understand why this is so slow. The disk array should easily handle twice that rate.

    Sorry the news couldn't be better. There's always the SETI@home fundraiser at bitcoinutopia. Or you could choose a worthy backup project
    26 Nov 2014, 4:53:07 UTC · Discuss

    Running out of workunits
    We are likely to (temporarily) run out of workunits to process as soon as this weekend. Please read this recent news item from Eric Korpela for further explanation leading up to this. We are currently solving various database issues, developing a new splitter so we can start processing our Green Bank Telescope data, and hunting for tapes that haven't fully been processed to get out of the current drought.
    13 Nov 2014, 18:25:49 UTC · Discuss

    Wow!-event results
    The 3rd annual SETI.Germany Wow!-event has completed, with 838 participants from 48 countries generating a record 463 million credits. See a list of the winners.
    29 Aug 2014, 22:07:28 UTC · Discuss

    UC scientists find first interstellar dust particles
    Our colleagues here at the UCB Space Sciences Lab recently reported the first capture and analysis of interstellar dust particles. They were aided by thousands of volunteers in the Stardust@home project.
    16 Aug 2014, 6:48:28 UTC · Discuss

    SETI.Germany Wow!-Event
    37 years after the detection of the Wow! Signal on August 15th, 1977, SETI.Germany is holding the third SETI@Home-Wow!-Event from 15.08.2014 to 29.08.2014. Join the crunching race, and maybe find the next Wow! signal. Everyone is welcome. Register here.
    8 Aug 2014, 8:56:56 UTC · Discuss

    What does loss of net neutrality mean for volunteer computing?
    Dr. Korpela has posted a new blog entry on Net Neutrality and why its loss might be bad for distributed computing. It includes instructions on how to comment to the the FCC about the issue.
    10 Jul 2014, 1:05:21 UTC · Discuss

    Smithsonian Video
    Recently Dan Werthimer was at the Smithsonian giving a talk about SETI. Video of this presentation is now available online.
    3 Jul 2014, 16:33:27 UTC · Discuss

    Dan Werthimer at the U.S. House of Representatives
    Our own Dan Werthimer went before the U.S. House of Representatives to present the current status of SETI research. Here is the full text of his testimony. Video is available at this location.
    22 May 2014, 17:41:13 UTC · Discuss

    "Science in the City" Video
    A new short video about our project (made by the Exploratorium in San Francisco) is now available. You can view it at the Exploratorium website or on YouTube.
    14 Apr 2014, 17:48:57 UTC · Discuss

    Friday March 21 SETI talks to be webcast live.
    The SETI talks by Jill Tarter, Eric Korpela, Shauna Sallmen, and Ian Morrison at the "Search for Life Beyond the Solar System" conference will be broadcast live on Friday, March 21. The scheduled time for the talks is:

    1:30PM PDT (2030 UTC) - Jill Tarter
    2:00PM PDT (2100 UTC) - Eric Korpela
    2:20PM PDT (2120 UTC) - Shauna Sallmen
    2:40PM PDT (2140 UTC) - Ian Morrison

    To connect go to http://connect.arc.nasa.gov/ebi2014/. If you have difficulty with that link, try http://connect.arc.nasa.gov/ebi2014?launcher=false Once you are there, select enter as guest, and enter a name, then click "Enter Room". Participants may get the opportunity to ask questions of the speakers.
    20 Mar 2014, 21:48:26 UTC · Discuss

    Astropulse database is back.
    Astropulse work is flowing once again. Thanks to Matt and Jeff for performing the necessary brain transplant.
    6 Mar 2014, 19:25:10 UTC · Discuss

    Astropulse Offline
    The server hosting the Astropulse database crashed. The database is okay, and we have a replacement machine, but it may be 1-2 weeks before Astropulse is back on line. We are still serving regular (multibeam) workunits in the meantime.
    26 Feb 2014, 20:22:02 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home now supports Intel GPUs
    We've released SETI@home 7.03 for Intel GPUs that support OpenCL 1.2. If you have an Intel GPU and want to use it to speed up SETI@home make sure that "Use Intel GPU" is set to "yes" in your Project Preferences.

    Thanks again to the crew at lunatics.kwsn.net for porting and testing this app.
    29 Jan 2014, 19:18:22 UTC · Discuss

    Our Winter 2013 fundraising drive is underway.
    If you didn't get our email detailing some of our accomplishments and plans, you can read it here.
    21 Nov 2013, 0:55:31 UTC · Discuss

    Long-time setizen John Clark has passed away.
    We're sad to report the passing of long time SETI@home volunteer John Clark. Those of us who frequented the forums will certainly remember him. John was very recently mourning the passing of his wife, Sheila. Our thoughts are with his family and friends.

    People are posting their condolences and their memories of John in this thread.
    12 Nov 2013, 16:43:28 UTC · Discuss

    Berkeley SETI at California Academy of Sciences
    Berkeley SETI scientists will be at the California Academy of Sciences this week. Dan Werthimer will be giving a talk Thursday night (Oct 10) at Nightlife at the Academy. Eric Korpela, Andrew Siemion, and other SETI scientists will be there as well to answer questions and chat about SETI. Nightlife runs from 6pm to 10pm and is for people aged 21 and over.

    On Saturday and Sunday, Eric and Andrew will be participating in Brilliant!Science: Extraterrestrial Life also at the Academy. They'll be giving demonstrations and explaining SETI techology and techniques. This event is child friendly and runs from 10am to 4pm on Saturday and Sunday.

    10 Oct 2013, 5:24:18 UTC · Discuss

    NRAO telescopes will be taken offline due to government shutdown
    We've received notice that the NRAO telescopes at Greenbank will be shut down at 5pm on Friday if the government shutdown continues. We don't have any immediately scheduled observations there, so this should not affect us in the short term.

    We have not yet heard of any impact on Arecibo, but since it is operated under contract rather than being directly operated by the government, we are hoping observations there will continue.
    3 Oct 2013, 17:11:45 UTC · Discuss

    We are now mostly recovered from a campus wide power outage.
    Last night there was a power outage that affected the entire Berkeley campus. The data center, where our servers are located, does have facility wide UPS so all servers stayed up. Unfortunately, the data center air conditioning did not stay up. Machines were getting hot, so the data center staff had to bring them down.
    1 Oct 2013, 21:48:07 UTC · Discuss

    Android Beta Testers Needed
    We're beta testing the Android version of the SETI@home application and we're looking for more testers to speed up the process. If you'd like to help, install the Android version of BOINC through the Google Play Store or the Amazon App Store. Then when asked to join a project enter http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/beta as the project URL.

    note: The beta project does not have access to SETI@home user accounts. Unless you're already using the beta project, you'll need to create a new account there.
    5 Sep 2013, 0:33:04 UTC · Discuss

    SETI.Germany event celebrates Wow! signal anniversary
    SETI.Germany is organizing an Event to celebrate and honor the 36th Anniversary of the Wow! Signal detection. The event will happen from Aug 15th, 16:00 UTC to Aug 29th 2013 16:00 UTC.
    5 Aug 2013, 18:42:58 UTC · Discuss

    What's new about SETI@home v7
    Dr. Korpela has posted his promised summary of what is new in SETI@home v7.
    10 Jun 2013, 22:44:29 UTC · Discuss

    AVG 2013 virus scanner false positive on SETI@home 7 for Windows
    The AVG virus scanner heuristic virus detection method reports a false positive for SETI@home version 7.00 on windows. This alert doesn't not indicate an infection with a known virus, but indicates that the application contains code that the virus scanner considers to be suspicious. AVG 2012 apparently does not report any issues.

    We believe that this alert is related to the method we used to compress the executable in order to save network bandwidth. We are examining how we can resolve the problem. Until then the best strategy is to click "cancel" or "ignore" to the AVG warnings.
    30 May 2013, 17:45:58 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home Version 7 has been released
    Your BOINC client should automatically download it in the next few days. No need to abort any current work you are doing.

    We've released versions for Windows, MacOS and Linux, and four versions for NVIDIA graphics cards running under windows, and versions for ATI graphics card running under Windows and Linux.

    My thanks to the KWSN/lunatics folks for getting this done and especially to Raistmer, Jason, Josef, Urs, Claggy, Mike, Richard, and too many beta testers to name.

    Tomorrow I'll post explaining why we wanted version 7 and what's different about the analysis it does.
    30 May 2013, 0:39:58 UTC · Discuss

    Server Relocation
    We are moving most of our servers to a colocation facility with better cooling, power, and network, which should improve uptime in general. This procedure will start on Monday, April 1st at 08:00 (PDT) and should take 3 days to complete, during which our entire project will be unavailable.
    20 Mar 2013, 21:56:25 UTC · Discuss

    Successful Lab Repairs
    The entire lab was shut down this past weekend for electrical repairs. We came back on line Sunday morning (Feb 24th).
    24 Feb 2013, 17:06:21 UTC · Discuss

    Servers are back on line after Monday's outage
    UPDATE: the air conditioning unit in our server closet was successfully repaired on Monday. All systems are back to normal functionality.
    26 Dec 2012, 23:10:40 UTC · Discuss

    Scheduler is back up...
    Problems with timeouts will continue to occur, but less frequently, we hope.
    28 Nov 2012, 19:47:46 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home scheduler is down until further notice.
    Scheduler crashes have continued, so we'll be down until we've isolated and solved the problem.
    23 Nov 2012, 19:17:54 UTC · Discuss

    We are thankful for....
    We're thankful for you, our volunteers, who continue to donate your time, computers and money to keep SETI@home up and running and improving.


    22 Nov 2012, 21:45:15 UTC · Discuss

    Scheduler crashed.
    The scheduler will be down until someone can get to the lab to reboot it. I'll try to convince Angela to let me go in once the turkey is in the oven.
    22 Nov 2012, 17:30:12 UTC · Discuss

    Continued server problems.
    We're continuing to have issues due to a database problem early last week and a botched attempt to fix it.

    The problem is that the result and host tables in the database have grown large enough, and hosts have gotten fast enough that the lookup of result in process for a host and the enumeration of new results to send don't finish before the web connection times out either on the server or the client side. This resulted in hosts being assigned large number or results to compute without the transaction that tells them about these results being completed. The host. think it received no results would then contact the server for more results, which it would again not receive.

    This isn't a hardware problem. The database currently fits in memory and the processors are fast. We've just crossed a threshold where each host computes fast enough that host queues and the result table have become large enough to cause this problem. To solve it, we've put per host limits on results in process back in place. But hosts that are having this problem will probably continue to have it until the average number of results per host has fallen to a workable level. That could take weeks.

    For a more permanent fix, we plan do more work in each result by quadrupling the size of the workunits. But that fix will probably take months to implement and test.
    19 Nov 2012, 1:02:54 UTC · Discuss

    We are recovering from a database crash
    The main boinc database suffered a crash this morning. We are back up and running now and are catching up on work distribution.
    24 Oct 2012, 22:56:13 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home annual fund raising campaign has started
    We've started out annual fund raising campaign. If you haven't gotten an announcement in your email, you can find your letter here. Thanks in advance for your help keeping SETI@home going!
    12 Oct 2012, 18:42:02 UTC · Discuss

    Weekend Fundraising Challenge-Completed
    SETI@home volunteer Mr. Kevvy has started a Weekend Fundraising Challenge to raise money for disks we need to transport data from Green Bank Observatory.
    6 Oct 2012, 3:36:35 UTC · Discuss

    Donate to SETI@home, get discounts on telescopes and more
    We've teamed up with OpticsPlanet to create a fundraiser where you can support SETI@home while getting great deals on telescopes, astronomy gear, sunglasses & prescription eyewear and much more! Check it out here at the SETI@home coupon store.
    6 Sep 2012, 14:55:44 UTC · Discuss

    Thank You Terabit Systems and GPU Users Group!
    Through the fine work of the GPU Users Group, Terabit Systems has generously donated both a 1Gbit and a 10Gbit ethernet switch to our group. The 1Gbit switch will be a substantial upgrade to our server room. The 10Gbit switch will become part of a very high speed SETI spectrometer to be deployed at the Greenbank Telescope.
    20 Aug 2012, 21:54:38 UTC · Discuss

    Bug in server affecting older BOINC clients with NVIDIA GPUs.
    We've identified a bug in the current BOINC server that is online at SETI@home. With older BOINC clients this bug results in running multiple SETI@home GPU applications simultaneously on a single GPU.

    While we debug and fix the problem we've suspended distribution of NVIDIA work. We hope that everything will be back to normal some time tomorrow.
    17 Aug 2012, 5:37:11 UTC · Discuss

    Recovering from power outage.
    We're slowly recovering from the power outage. The main BOINC database was performing poorly at first for an unknown reason. We'll be monitoring it as the recovery continues.
    16 Aug 2012, 20:18:22 UTC · Discuss

    New AstroPulse applications for GPUs.
    We've released the first of four new AstroPulse Windows applications for ATI/AMD Graphics Processing Units that support the OpenCL language. If you've got an one of these GPUs you may be able to process AstroPulse results 15x faster than your CPU alone. If your computer supports a version, it should get it automatically.

    The first release supports ATI GPUs on BOINC 7.0.25 or later. The second release (probably next tuesday) will support ATI GPUs on BOINC versions prior to 7.0.25.
    The final two version will be for NVIDIA GPUs. (Until then NVIDIA GPUs will have to satisfy themselves with SETI@home results).

    Thanks to the optimizers at KWSN and the folk at the beta project for helping me get this out.
    8 Aug 2012, 2:08:58 UTC · Discuss

    SETI.Germany celebrates Wow! signal anniversary
    SETI.Germany is organizing an Event to celebrate and honor the 35th Anniversary of the Wow! Signal detection. The event will happen from Aug 15th, 4:00 PM to Aug 29th 2012 4:00 PM UTC.
    7 Aug 2012, 6:49:18 UTC · Discuss

    Alien computer viruses?
    Berkeley SETI PhD candidate Andrew Siemion talks about why your computer won't be getting an alien virus in this article on io9.com.
    28 Jun 2012, 15:40:55 UTC · Discuss

    Another Outage!
    Our entire building suffered some wild power fluctuations early this morning, affecting many projects including SETI@home. This is completely unrelated to power issues from a couple weeks ago. Despite losing some hardware all of our services are recovering.
    11 Jun 2012, 21:29:17 UTC · Discuss

    Major Power Outage at SSL
    There was a major power outage on Tuesday evening that affected several buildings here on campus including the entire Space Sciences Laboratory. Power has been restored this morning, and we are slowly getting the project back on line.
    18 May 2012, 15:57:18 UTC · Discuss

    Your chance to be internationally famous.
    The author I mentioned in the previous news item would also like to interview someone outside of the US, hopefully in an interesting location. Again, contact me if you fit the bill.
    5 Apr 2012, 19:47:58 UTC · Discuss

    Your chance to be famous.
    We've been contacted by one of the authors of a book/multimedia project called "The Human Face of Big Data." They're looking to interview someone who is heavily involved in SETI@home (lots of computers) and is also participating in SETILive.

    If that's you, drop me a line and I'll help you get connected.
    23 Mar 2012, 5:13:35 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home and SETILive
    If you're wondering about the difference between SETI@home and SETILive, Dr. Korpela has posted the differences here.
    15 Mar 2012, 0:12:08 UTC · Discuss

    Astropulse v6 has been released for linux and windows.
    We've released the Astropulse version 6 application to the SETI@home project. The only real difference is a couple of minus signs in the code that were added to match changes to the way the data recorder works.

    It'll take a while for the credit granted by this application to settle out to a reasonably constant value. If you run optimized applications, I'd suggest you wait a couple of weeks before starting to do Astropulse v6 work just to avoid the possibility that you will be granted an extremely low credit for your work.
    13 Mar 2012, 22:49:21 UTC · Discuss

    Project Back Online After Overnight Outage
    Update: After reaching a logical (i.e. not physical) limitation in our science database we had to rebuild one table. No data were lost. We resumed normal operations today around noon.
    14 Feb 2012, 22:10:15 UTC · Discuss

    Huffington Post SETI@home Blog.
    SETI@home Project Scientist Eric Korpela has published a blog entry in the Huffington Post's new science section. Other Berkeley SETI bloggers may follow. Depending upon the response we may only blog there, may restrict blog entries here to things directly related to SETI@home, or we may duplicate the posts here. Let us know what you think.
    6 Feb 2012, 21:07:12 UTC · Discuss

    First Look at Kepler SETI Candidate Signals
    Check out our First Look at Kepler SETI Candidate Signals - No ET yet.
    5 Jan 2012, 21:20:22 UTC · Discuss

    2 Billion Results
    Tuesday morning we reached 2 Billion BOINC results processed by SETI@home! Or to be more accurate, 2 to the power of 31 results (2,147,483,648). This explains why we haven't yet recovered from the weekly outage: we need to update code to accept larger numbers.
    8 Nov 2011, 23:27:33 UTC · Discuss

    BOINC download server is down.
    The BOINC download server is offline, and will remain so for a day or two while we effect repairs.
    2 Nov 2011, 3:49:57 UTC · Discuss

    Network routing problems have been fixed
    For the last few months, network routing issues have been interfering with the connectivity of some participants. The actual problem turned out to be a lack of sufficient memory in our router at the PAIX in Palo Alto. Two days ago we increased the memory in that router by a factor of four. This fixed the problem.

    We would like to thank Hurricane Electric, Packet Clearing House, and CENIC for their great technical help in diagnosing and fixing this problem.
    21 Oct 2011, 17:50:51 UTC · Discuss

    Fall Funding Drive
    Our annual fall funding drive has started. If you haven't gotten our message in your email, you can see it here. Please help us keep SETI@home going by donating today.
    9 Oct 2011, 18:27:45 UTC · Discuss

    Another way to support SETI@home
    In addition to crunching, you can provide some support to SETI@home by using GoodSearch and GoodShop. These search engines redirect a half their advertising to revenues to charity. Just be sure to choose "University of California - SETI@home" as your charity of choice.
    12 Sep 2011, 20:38:21 UTC · Discuss

    more data on the way
    In an attempt to push some older unanalyzed files through the pipeline we encountered data that could not be successfully preprocessed or split. This has resulted in work distribution going to near zero. We are currently transferring newer files from off site storage and soon will be receiving a disk shipment from Arecibo. Once these data are on hand work distribution will pick up.
    8 Sep 2011, 16:56:49 UTC · Discuss

    storage service is back up
    We have migrated storage service to thumper. Now it's a matter of transferring raw data to thumper, preprocessing it, and splitting it. This will all take some time. The Overland server is up and its raid is operational (thanks Overland!). Diagnosis of this unit is proceeding.

    28 May 2011, 14:30:01 UTC · Discuss

    More problems with workunit storage server...
    One of the RAID arrays failed to rebuild. Personnel from Overland Storage are working to solve the problems. Meanwhile we're creating temporary working storage on Thumper.
    27 May 2011, 19:48:47 UTC · Discuss

    work generation temporarily halted (update)
    The storage server has been repaired. It will take some hours to resync the RAID. We will let that process complete before restarting work generation.
    26 May 2011, 16:03:55 UTC · Discuss

    Change of management at Arecibo.
    ML1 pointed out an article about the change of management of the Arecibo Observatory. Cornell University, which has managed Arecibo since it opened, will no longer be managing the Observatory. A consortium of organizations will new be handling the management. We don't expect this to affect SETI@home much. It may mean changes to how observing is scheduled and how much observing time we receive per year.
    25 May 2011, 17:50:14 UTC · Discuss

    Here's the press release for current GBT observations:
    UC Berkeley SETI Survey Focuses on Kepler's Top Earth Like Planets
    16 May 2011, 22:35:55 UTC · Discuss

    Green Bank Telescope observations to start Saturday.
    Grad student Andrew Siemion reports that new modifications to a data recorder at Green Bank that we need for our Kepler SETI observations are now complete, thanks to a huge amount of help from Paul Demorest, a former grad student and one of initial authors of AstroPulse. Our first hour of test time is scheduled for this Saturday, 17:30 EDT. We'll be observing with 450 seconds per target on 90 Kepler field stars with interesting planet candidates (~habitable zone, ~Earth size, ~Earth period, ~several planets), then do a raster scan of the entire Kepler field.
    6 May 2011, 22:29:54 UTC · Discuss

    Passing of a setizen.
    We are sad to report that long time SETI@home volunteer Wes Wycoff has passed away. His efforts will be missed. Our condolences go out to his friends and family.
    27 Apr 2011, 22:07:36 UTC · Discuss

    Allen Telescope Array Hibernation
    As noted in the Scientific American and elsewhere, the Allen Telescope Array was recently forced into hibernation. While we are sad to see this happen, SETI@home receives its data elsewhere, so our project is not directly affected. Dr. Eric Korpela wrote a helpful Q&A about this in the SETI@home Staff Blog.
    27 Apr 2011, 21:44:03 UTC · Discuss

    Microdonations through Flattr.
    SETI@home volunteers that use Flattr can now make microdonations to SETI@home by pressing the button at the bottom of the main SETI@home page.
    10 Jan 2011, 20:36:46 UTC · Discuss

    Happy New Year from SETI@home
    Thanks again for another year of generous support for our project! We couldn't do this without everybody's help. Onward to 2011...
    29 Dec 2010, 20:25:17 UTC · Discuss

    Workunit Shortage
    Over this past weekend we had an disk issue (unrelated to the new servers) which hampered workunit creation. We back to full production at this point, though due to high demand it might be a while until your clients receive new work.
    13 Dec 2010, 18:32:39 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home is back online
    We've been offline for over a month to remodel our database servers. The bulk of this work is complete, and work is being distributed. Please note we may continue to bring servers up/down over the next few weeks (outside of regularly planned outages) as we wrap up the final stages of this major endeavor.
    8 Dec 2010, 20:45:55 UTC · Discuss

    Donation Site Problems
    Some browsers (especially older ones) may experience trouble with the SETI@home donation site at givetocal.berkeley.edu if the browser doesn't recognize COMODO CA, Ltd as a valid security certification authority. Details and a workaround are available here.
    7 Dec 2010, 23:13:40 UTC · Discuss

    Dr. Masaki Morimoto, Japanese SETI pioneer, has died.
    Dr. Masaki Morimoto, a SETI pioneer and one of the fathers of Japanese radio astronomy, passed away this morning at the age of 78. He suggested the frequency L11->L10 transition of formaldehyde (4.83GHz) as a possible magic frequency for extraterrestrial communications. He was active participant in SETI searches up to the present, and influenced many younger researchers. He will be missed.
    16 Nov 2010, 17:15:11 UTC · Discuss

    The project is down while we remodel our database servers.
    The machine that was running the main BOINC database has become too unreliable to use. The backup server does not have the capacity to run the project on its own.

    The very good news is that we just ordered two new servers! One will be the new BOINC database server and the other will be the new back end science database server. Our capacity to both distribute and analyze our data will increase significantly with these new machines.

    While we prepare for these new servers and get them going once they arrive, the project will be down. Although no new work will be distributed, all outstanding work will be uploaded and credited. This web site and the forums will remain up for most of the remodeling period.

    Funding for the new servers has come entirely from very generous donations from the SETI@Home community.
    28 Oct 2010, 22:26:47 UTC · Discuss

    Don Backer has passed away.
    Don Backer, Berkeley professor and director of the Allen Telescope Array, passed away on Sunday, July 25th. Don was a very important contributor to radio astronomy and to the study of pulsars. He will be missed.
    27 Jul 2010, 0:36:12 UTC · Discuss

    Arecibo Observatory Repair Status
    A structural failure at the telescope on February 3rd was partially repaired in March, and we've been observing with reduced motion since then. The next phase of repairs is slated to start July 12th, and may take up to 6 weeks for full implementation and testing.
    30 Jun 2010, 20:35:17 UTC · Discuss

    New Thesis
    Astropulse: A Search for Microsecond Transient Radio Signals by Joshua von Korff (congratulations, Josh!).
    7 Jun 2010, 16:35:52 UTC · Discuss

    New Paper Describing Berkeley SETI Instruments
    Here is the pdf of another paper presented at the Astrobiology Science Conference. This paper describes the various strategies and instruments developed by Berkeley SETI / CASPER team, with a focus on hardware.
    27 May 2010, 16:49:01 UTC · Discuss

    New Paper on the NTPCkr and RFI Rejection
    Here is the pdf of a new paper describing our strategy for rejecting interference and finding candidate signals. This paper was presented at the Astrobiology Science Conference which was held April 26-29 in Texas.
    26 May 2010, 18:53:20 UTC · Discuss

    Interview on www.seti.cl
    David Anderson, director of BOINC and SETI@home, is interviewed on www.seti.cl (Spanish, English).
    11 May 2010, 22:25:52 UTC · Discuss

    The Great Debate - video now available
    You can now see video from "The Great Debate - Are we Alone?", publicly held by Dan Werthimer and Geoff Marcy on April 30th at UC Berkeley.
    3 May 2010, 21:56:35 UTC · Discuss

    Italian IRC channel
    The IRC channel #boinc-it on irc.freenode.net has been created for discussion of BOINC and SETI@home in Italian.
    23 Apr 2010, 22:14:47 UTC · Discuss

    "Are We Alone?" The Great Debate
    Planet-hunter Geoff Marcy and SETI scientist Dan Werthimer will be having a public debate about the existence of technological life in the universe on Friday, April 30, 2010 (7:30pm) at UC Berkeley. Free admission. Click here for more information.

    Update: This will be streamed live. When exactly? It depends where you are.
    15 Mar 2010, 16:47:27 UTC · Discuss

    Video on making a desktop supercomputer
    Check out a Youtube video about making a multi-GPU desktop supercomputer.
    3 Mar 2010, 20:58:51 UTC · Discuss

    Designer of the Arecibo telescope has passed away.
    William E. Gordon, the designer of the Arecibo radio telescope, has passed away at the age of 92.
    22 Feb 2010, 2:23:21 UTC · Discuss

    Italian radio interview
    Gianni Urso is interviewed by Bruno Moretti Turri on radio astronomy, SETI@home, and BOINC distributed computing (31 min., in Italian)
    24 Dec 2009, 18:42:03 UTC · Discuss

    We started sending out our annual year-end donation drive mass e-mail. The process could take days. If you didn't get one (possibly due to spam blocking), you can read the same letter on-line here. Thank you!!!
    10 Dec 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home Project Scientist Eric Korpela has posted an FAQ and comments about the forced resignation at Higley Unified School District in Arizona
    3 Dec 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The connectivity problem noted yesterday turned out to be one of our switches and not the router.
    We swapped in a replacement switch today and connectivity was restored.
    27 Nov 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Our router, which connects all of our data servers to the Internet, is down. Until
    we resolve this, the project is unable to send out work or receive results.
    26 Nov 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home is recognized as a landmark event in
    The History of the Internet.
    16 Nov 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have been in the process of transitioning parts of our data pipeline. You may be having trouble downloading workunits until this process is complete - hopefully later this week.
    2 Nov 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Welcome to SETI.IR,
    a new web site for SETI@home participants in Iran
    and other Persian-speaking countries.
    28 Oct 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The UC Berkeley Astronomy Department is holding a Telescope Building Workshop and Star Party on October 23 at 7pm in celebration of the International Year of Astronomy. If you would like to attend, details can be found here
    21 Oct 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home Project Scientist Eric Korpela discusses life in the universe in
    Galactic Watercooler Podcast #190. This is one episode in an arc relating to the late Carl Sagan's Cosmos series.
    19 Oct 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    An article in PCWorld,
    12 Worthy Causes Seek Your Spare PC Cycles,
    describes BOINC and 12 projects that use it,
    including SETI@home.
    4 Sep 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Facebook users: check out the
    BOINC Milestones app.
    3 Sep 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The Space Sciences Lab at UC Berkeley (which is where SETI@home resides) recently celebrated its 50 anniversary.
    3 Sep 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Here's a fun slideshow/article in Network World about BOINC and various other BOINC projects.
    31 Aug 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    An article in The Star[/url] (New Zealand) tells how a 14-year-old arranged to run SETI@home on 90 computers at his school.
    An     article in The Star (New Zealand)
    tells how a 14-year-old arranged to run SETI@home
    on 90 computers at his school.

    19 Aug 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are proud to announce the very first publicly available output of the Near-Time Persistency Checker (a process which ranks the statistical interest of points on the sky). Please read the Frequency Asked Questions first.
    19 Aug 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The SETI@Netherlands team is hosting a 10th anniversary Gauntlet. If you think your machines have the power to compete, signups end September 18th.
    12 Aug 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We updated the master seti.berkeley.edu page, which contains information/links about all of U.C. Berkeley's SETI-related projects, as well as general weekly meeting minutes!
    10 Aug 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    In case anybody missed them (links were posted elsewhere on this site),
    here are videos of all the talks
    given during the SETI@home 10 Year Anniversary celebration in May.
    30 Jul 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The web site of the
    Paddy's in Space team
    is newly renovated.
    25 Jul 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The Institution of Engineering and Technology has posted an article about volunteer computing in astronomy.
    13 Jul 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We updated the SERENDIP web site, now containing information about our recent trip to Arecibo (to install the new instrument and do some testing).
    29 Jun 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Here's a video of Dan Werthimer giving a short talk about SETI@home at the Maker Faire Bay Area (on May 30th, 2009). Warning: must sit through ad before viewing.
    15 Jun 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Dan Werthimer was on Science Friday discussing SETI@home's 10 year anniversary. Here is a recording of the interview.
    26 May 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    A new update from the Planetary Society: SERENDIP Takes a Great Leap Forward.
    26 May 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    You can tune in to video from tomorrow's SETI@home Anniversary seminar live on ustream.tv starting at 10am pacific time (1700 UTC). If you can't watch it live, don't worry. We will be posting the video for download later.
    20 May 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss


    SETI@home 10th Anniversary T-shirts are now available for order. See this thread for details. Thanks to Uli for handling the T-shirt manufacturing and shipping, and thanks to Misfit for the winning design.
    19 May 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    If you're planning to attend the SETI@home 10th anniversary picnic in Berkeley on May 23, please RSVP if you haven't done so already. You can RSVP in this thread, send a personal message to Uli or email korpela -AT- ssl.berkeley.edu .
    14 May 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home marks its
    10th anniversary on 17 May 2009.
    A
    celebration event
    will be held on 21 May.
    Volunteers can submit questions for a panel discussion,
    and can view the proceedings online.
    30 Apr 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss


    A new portal for astronomy related newsfeeds and blogs called Portal to the Universe has opened.

    23 Apr 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The SETIbrasilia
    team web site has been updated with
    pictures of a trip to Arecibo.

    15 Apr 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Contratulations to team SETI.USA, which has recently passed the 1,000,000,000 credit mark on SETI@home and continues to pile up credits at over 1 million per day!
    6 Apr 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    One of our volunteers, Blurf, has started a SETI@Home Tax Time Donation Challenge!
    31 Mar 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home Chief Scientist Dan Werthimer gave a International Year of Astronomy talk in Berkeley on March 21st. A video of the talk is available here.
    25 Mar 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are currently managing several problems with the science database server. The database will be okay, but it is currently offline. It was take a while before we are fully back up and running normally. In the meantime we will mostly be unable to create new workunits, so expect your clients to run idle for the next few days (unless you are running other BOINC projects!).
    24 Mar 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Congratulations to SETIBR,
    the Brazilian team which,
    across several BOINC-based projects,
    has achieved the levels of 100K average credit
    and 50M total credit.
    3 Feb 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss



    SETI@home volunteers in the San Francisco Bay Area may
    be interested in attending some of the
    public events planned
    by the UC Berkeley Astronomy Department
    for the International Year of Astronomy (2009).
    Our own Dan Werthimer will be speaking on March 21st.









    27 Jan 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss


    A version of SETI@home that runs on NVIDIA graphics boards
    using their CUDA computing engine has been released.
    The CUDA version runs up to 10X faster than the CPU version.
    NVIDIA has put out a press release
    about the SETI@home CUDA client and about GPU Grid.
    See directions for getting started.

    18 Dec 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss



    Overland Storage donated 10 Terabytes
    of network attached storage to us today
    (in the form of one Snap Server 18000 and two SD30 expansion units).
    This will vastly help our current workunit/raw data storage
    problems. Thank you Overland!

    8 Dec 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Giuseppe Cocconi, author (with Philip Morrison) of the first paper
    on radio SETI,
    'Searching for Interstellar Communications' and a central figure
    in particle physics and cosmic rays, passed away on 9 November at age 94.
    Read more about Cocconi.

    8 Dec 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Check out the new Spanish-language site, BOINC SETI Chile.[/url]
    20 Nov 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The CASPER/SETI@home/Astropulse teams wrote a joint paper about
    New SETI Sky Surveys for Radio Pulses. Warning: highly technical
    (to be published in Acta Astronautica).
    14 Nov 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We're
    looking for an attorney to assist us with setting up a
    charitable 501(c)(3) foundation which will handle fundraising operations
    for the SETI@home project.
    3 Nov 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Some of our volunteers have started a Halloween Donation Challenge. Feel free to beat the holiday rush. Assuming your bank is still in business, and you can still afford it.
    17 Oct 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    By the way... SETI@home just received its billionth result using BOINC - thanks to everybody who donated their computing power to help us reach this incredible milestone!
    24 Sep 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The Planetary Society presents a radio interview with Dan Werthimer: "Astropulse: A New Way for E.T. to Phone Home"
    16 Sep 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    New article from The Planetary Society: "Astropulse: A Fresh Look at the Skies in Search of E.T."
    25 Aug 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The Foundation for Computational Learning and Science is performing a survey of BOINC users. The survey asks BOINC client users about their demographic data, level of education, income, project participation, level of interest, suggestions for improvement, and technical data related to their computers running BOINC. If you would like to participate the survey is here.
    25 Aug 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Apparently people weren't satisfied with a 3 day challenge, so Blurf started a new 5 Day SETI Donation Challenge.
    18 Aug 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Thank you to all who gave for Blurf's 3 Day Seti Donation Challenge! The final amounts are: $5977.65 Donated and $6500 Pledged.
    17 Aug 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Some of our volunteers have started a 3 Day Donation Challenge.
    15 Aug 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The upload server has been fixed. Once the system clears the backlog of results waiting to be uploaded, validated, and assimilated, disk space will clear up and this will allow new work to be generated.
    11 Aug 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We've started creating work for SETI@home's new Astropulse application. At first we will just create a small amount, but we expect to enter full production next week.
    25 Jul 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    There is an article at Wikinews[/url] about the budget cuts that threaten the Arecibo telescope.
    22 Jul 2008, 0:00:00 UTC ·     Discuss

    Apple/Mac computers have been unable to get new workunits since yesterday - we're working on this bug.
    22 Jul 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have been struggling with database problems for the past few days, though we made some progress today. Various services may still be up and down throughout the weekend, but we may be beyond the worst of it.
    11 Jul 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The future of Arecibo Observatory (where SETI@home collects its data) is threatened. If you are a U.S.
    citizen, please write your representatives to support the Senate bill and
    House resolution to continue Arecibo's funding.
    3 Jul 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We swapped servers around this morning (in preparation of future upgrades) - you may be experiencing temporarily difficulty connecting to our data servers. Stopping/restarting your BOINC client may help.
    25 Jun 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are in the process of recovering from a minor science database issue. Due to the general heavy load on our systems you might find it hard to upload/download work for the next day or so.
    3 Jun 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home Project Scientist Eric Korpela speaks about the probablility of finding intelligent life on earthlike planets as one of the guests interviewed by Seth Shostak on this week edition of 'Are We Alone', the SETI Institute's Weekly radio magazine.
    6 May 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Congratulations to team SETI.USA. Their total BOINC credits have exceeded 1 billion cobblestones!
    1 May 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The Near Time Persistency Checker (software we are developing to get up-to-date analysis of SETI@home results) has enjoyed recent progress.
    There is work still to be done, but the basic plumbing is in place - for example, on the Science Status page we
    added counts of signals SETI@home found where the Arecibo is currently pointing.
    28 Apr 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Some SETI@home volunteers put together a tribute to Arthur C. Clarke as a means of paying their final respects. We are sure he would have been touched by your sentiments.
    7 Apr 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Last night the BOINC database server crashed - all services are recovering now.
    3 Apr 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Arthur C. Clarke, visionary science fiction writer and friend of the SETI@home Project, passed away today at the age of 90.
    18 Mar 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    A tip of the hat to the
    Clemson University #1 team, which has been
    the top-ranked team in the University category for several years.
    31 Jan 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have been informed of the passing of a dedicated SETI@home volunteer and active participant on the forums, Dennis Peters, (aka Dogbytes). Our condolences go out to his family and friends.
    18 Jan 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    A new article from the Planetary Society:
    From SETI@home to Hominid Fossils: Citizen Cyberscience Reshapes Research Landscape.
    15 Jan 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    UC Berkeley Press Release: SETI@home looking for more volunteers.
    3 Jan 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Outage Update: Last night (December 6) around 15:00 PST we powered
    down the entire project for lab-wide electrical repairs. Without much ado we turned everything
    back on this morning, and all data servers are slowly catching up.
    7 Dec 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Live in Washington DC? Get together with other BOINC users via
    Meetup
    (or create a Meetup
    in your own city    ).
    28 Nov 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The preferences for email notification of private messages
    was mistakenly initialized to 'on'.
    We have changed it to 'off' for all users.
    If you want to turn it back on,
    go here.
    18 Nov 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We will be having a 4 hour outage on Monday, 11/19/2007, starting at 10:00 PST. The purpose of this outage is to reroute many of the power cords for
    the project servers, rearrange some of our UPSs and pull deprecated equipment out of
    the server room.
    16 Nov 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    New science newsletter:
    Planetary System Detected Around SETI@home Target Star
    (article from the the Planetary Society).
    8 Nov 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    A big index build is stressing our science databases and the splitters are running very slowly. This
    has resulted in the project running out of work to send. We hope to see it clear by tomorrow morning.
    8 Nov 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home user Melt Wreckage sent us a song Arecibo Dance inspired by the
    1974 radio transmission from Arecibo.
    17 Oct 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are having air conditioning problems. The project is down for the night.
    14 Oct 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    In order to quickly recover from the fallout of recent server outages, we'll be offline all night to clean up the database. Data transactions will resume Tuesday afternoon.
    8 Oct 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Upload service is back to normal. Details are in technical news.
    5 Oct 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We tried moving the upload store off of a possibly flaky disk array yesterday. This slowed upload service
    dramatically. The slowdown was unexpected and we are in the process of fixing it.[/url].
    4 Oct 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We had three server crashes over the weekend and are recovering now. Details later today in technical news.
    1 Oct 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We note the passing of dedicated SETI@home volunteer John McCoy. Our thoughts and sympathies go out to his friends and family.
    19 Sep 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    There were some problems with our science database server over the weekend but we are
    currently creating and sending out new work.
    10 Sep 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The problematic server is back up and work is flowing.
    12 Aug 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Were're having problems with one our servers. We'll be down until someone can get into the lab to fix it.
    11 Aug 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Our BOINC database server crashed this afternoon and finally recovered. However other
    systems are having problems. We're probably going to be offline all night.
    All data services will be off until we clean all these things up.
    6 Aug 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Our Internet connectivity was restored at 01:00 PDT today.
    23 Jul 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    All of our servers came up fine after the power outage. However we are currently experiencing a routing problem that we are working with campus on. This problem is preventing the distribution of work. At this point it looks like we will be off the air until tomorrow.
    22 Jul 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    If you are having problems with the MacOS version of SETI@home (5.21) please reset the project to get version 5.22.
    19 Jul 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    There will be a lab-wide power outage (for repairs in a nearby building) this weekend. We'll be shutting down BOINC/SETI@home services around 16:00 PDT on Saturday, and coming back on line 08:00 PDT on Sunday. All web/data servers will be unreachable during this time.
    19 Jul 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    A mysterious source of radio interference has been identified and fixed - read about it here.
    9 Jul 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Here's a SETI@home Update (article written by the Planetary Society).
    9 Jul 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Amir Alexander of The Planetary Society talks about
    SETI, distributed computing, and space exploration in an interview by Mike of BOINC UK.
    2 Jul 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Help increase SETI@home's computing power -
    publicize SETI@home and BOINC by writing to computer magazines.
    27 Jun 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have an update on the Arecibo Painting Upgrade.
    19 Jun 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We're having a brief server outage to reconfigure our databases. We should be back up in an hour or so.
    13 Jun 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Read about how to participate in grid computing projects that benefit humanity.
    12 Jun 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We're moving our usual Tuesday outage to today (Monday) in order to clean
    up some problems we've been having with the BOINC database over the weekend.
    The data servers and most web pages will be offline during this time.
    11 Jun 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are back up after some additional complications. There will be a period
    of "catch up" before things are back to normal.
    25 May 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The database and project have been down for a few hours. We're working on the slow
    feeder problem that was causing work distribution to go slowly.
    25 May 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We've solved yesterday's problem and we're back up.
    21 May 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    If your BOINC client is not able to upload to or download from
    the SETI@Home servers, look for the message Message from Server: Incomplete request received
    in the BOINC Manager messages area. If you see that message, stopping
    and restarting your BOINC client should fix the problem.
    18 May 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We got the new server yesterday, inserted our old disks and booted
    it up. It came right up, but verifying the file systems took overnight.
    The work is being created, the splitters and assimilators are working.
    It will be a while before we catch up. Thank you for your continued
    patience and support.
    12 May 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Our science database server died on Tuesday, May 1st.
    We haven't been able to create new workunits since then (though we are still
    accepting completed results). Sun is graciously
    replacing this server. The bad news is, despite earlier claims, it won't be
    here until Friday the 11th, which means the earliest we'll be creating new
    work is Monday the 14th. Thank you for your continued patience! Updates,
    discussion, and more information about this and other server-related topics
    can be found in
    Technical News.
    9 May 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Great news! Sun Microsystems is coming to the rescue
    and will be replacing our inoperative science data base server. They are preparing
    the machine now and will be rushing it to us on Monday. Once we have
    the machine up and the database recovered, we can start sending work out
    again. Details on the server crash and our recovery from it can be found in Technical News.
    4 May 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Happy May Day. Unfortunately for us it's been "Mayday! Mayday!" At 4:43 (PDT) this morning, our science database machine, thumper, became hasenfeffer. It currently refuses to acknowledge that it has any disk drives. Since the controllers are attached to the motherboard, major repairs will probably be required. No work can be created until this machine gets fixed. We are on the phone with Sun now in hopes of securing repair or a replacement. More info in Technical News.
    1 May 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Since the announcement of Gliese 581c
    (the first possibly habitable extrasolar planet), we've been asked many times about
    what we have seen during our observations of this red dwarf star.
    Unfortunately, Gliese 581 is located just beyond the visible sky we
    can see at Arecibo Observatory, so we actually made no such observations.
    30 Apr 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Arecibo Observatory is currently shut down for three months to
    clean up corrosion on the telescope platform (which includes safe
    removal of lead paint). SETI@home will continue to operate on
    classic data, and we have a backlog of new multibeam data to
    analyze as well. While not collecting data we'll have extra time to
    work on Astropulse.
    23 Apr 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    As we are close to distributing new data recorded with the multi-beam
    recorder, we decreased redundancy levels for current data. In the near
    term, there may be periods when it is difficult to obtain work.
    Your BOINC clients should retry regularly on their own
    and will eventually get data to process.
    21 Apr 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are moving our database service around. Db_dump (stats) is off
    for a couple of days..
    4 Apr 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    This week our servers are being patched to include the new
    Daylight Savings Time schedule. Certain services (web sites, data
    transfers, etc.) may by off-line for short periods.
    5 Mar 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Yet another reason to run SETI@home - it can help
    recover stolen laptops.
    21 Feb 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are in process of making network changes which may have affected
    your SETI@home client's ability to connect to our servers. If you are
    having trouble, try this.
    13 Feb 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    GridRepublic
    has been selected as a finalist for the Web Awards
    at the 2007 SXSW Interactive Festival. Please
    click here
    to cast your vote for them at the SXSW website.
    5 Feb 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We're currently in the middle of network/database testing.
    Connections to our web and data servers may be intermittent.
    1 Feb 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are experiencing a database problem that is leading to erratic
    work distribution. We will run diagnostics
    and rebuild the affected tables(s) tomorrow.
    15 Jan 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    MySpace members: check out the
    BOINC on MySpace group.
    6 Jan 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We recovered from database problems over the past weekend. This
    was resulting in erratic workunit downloads. More in Tech
    News    .

    3 Jan 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    BOINC's new Online Help system
    lets you get help from volunteers
    by talking with them using Skype.
    Volunteers speak several languages.
    4 Dec 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home Classic users:
    you can now
    transfer your workunit totals to your SETI@home/BOINC account,
    even if you lost your Classic password.

    4 Dec 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Check out new add-on software:
    the SETI@home Toolbar
    for Firefox and IE on Windows, and
    Boinctray,
    a system tray application for Linux.
    7 Nov 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Vote for SETI@home (or not) in the
    BOINCcast.de screensaver contest
    (in German). UPDATE: SETI@home wins in the Natural Sciences
    division, edging out QMC at home    .
    Vote tally is here.
    5 Nov 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Dr. Eric Korpela was interviewed by Graeme Knight
    (a Post Graduate Astronomy student with
    Swinburne University, Victoria, Australia).
    Eric explains how SETI@home works, how the data is processed
    and the possibilities of finding ET.
    Download the MP3 file (11.8 MB).
    The interview was recorded at the studios of
    Radio KLFM.
    3 Nov 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Check out this SETI@home wallpaper from Scott Linder:




    25 Oct 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We had a couple minor server issues over the weekend.
    Details in Technical News.
    15 Oct 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Eric Korpela and David Anderson were interviewed today
    by Mike O'Connell of BOINC UK.
    Many topics were covered, including the question of
    credit and optimized clients.
    Download a recording of the conversation (MP3, 13.5 MB) from
    BOINC UK
    or a mirror at Berkeley.
    4 Oct 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Update: We are wrapping up a database upgrade and ran out of work
    to send out. However, we are now finally creating more. Expect heavy traffic
    on our servers.
    4 Oct 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    If you're interested in donating time -
    rather than computing power - to help Astronomical research,
    check out Clickworkers
    (from NASA Ames Research Center)
    and Stardust@home
    (from UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab).
    12 Sep 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Outage update: Though we moved a bulk of the data onto the new science
    database server over the weekend, there is still plenty to do before
    we can start using this new server. In the meantime, we may be able to
    start creating new work to send out later today.
    11 Sep 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The Planetary Society article on the new multibeam
    receiver and data recorder is now available
    as an MP3 file,
    thanks to the efforts of BOINC UK.
    8 Sep 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We ran out of work to send out due to our science database going down.
    More details in Technical News.
    8 Sep 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Check out the screensaver background image
    submitted by a user (and send us your own).
    4 Sep 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    GridRepublic,
    which lets you manage your account on SETI@home
    and other BOINC projects, recently moved into beta test.
    It was written up by CNET.
    24 Aug 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Teams may now order
    SETI@home T-shirts and mugs with their team logo added.
    21 Aug 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Read the latest
    science
    newsletter     from the Planetary Society about our new
    multi-beam receiver.
    14 Aug 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Spread the word about SETI@home -
    send email to your friends and family.
    28 Jul 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    BOINC user survey:
    due to a bug in our software, answers to the question
    'Which are the most important factors when you decide whether to participate in a BOINC project?' were not recorded correctly.
    Please fill out the survey form again.
    We apologize for the inconvenience.
    22 Jul 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Please fill out the BOINC user survey.
    Your responses will help us improve SETI@home.

    15 Jul 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We had a power glitch this morning that brought down our
    science database. The assimilators and splitters are off
    while we run checks on the tables.
    14 Jul 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Last night we had a lab-wide power outage to diagnose
    electrical problems in a nearby facility.
    More detail available in Technical News.
    7 Jul 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Last week the new multi-beam data recorder was installed
    at Arecibo Observatory and has already taken some data. A science newsletter with
    more details is forthcoming.
    15 Jun 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    There will be a brief outage today at 17:00 UTC for database maintenance. We estimate the data servers and web pages will be offline for 2 hours, after which the usual "catch up" period will follow.
    2 Jun 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    At 13:30 UTC yesterday the SETI@home upload/download server failed. We've solved the problem, so you should be able to upload results and download new work at this time. There will probably be a long period where the servers are overloaded with backlogged requests. Thank you for your patience.
    30 May 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The costs of electricity, both monetary and environmental,
    are increasing.
    Be aware of the
    energy considerations
    associated with SETI@home and volunteer computing.
    17 May 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    All of our splitters have been altered to create workunits for SETI@home enhanced. Thanks for your patience during this transition.
    16 May 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    A cascade of problems today caused inability to return results and later, the inability to download new work. One of the data servers lost the ability to see the upload directory. After reboot, it temporarily lost the ability to see the entire network.
    16 May 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    An excellent Catalan-language site,
    www.seti.cat,
    has recently opened; check it out.
    14 May 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    A scene in the new television film, Mammoth (Sci-Fi Channel), prominently features the SETI@Home screensaver. Access the clip here
    11 May 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The first SETI@home fundraising drive has drawn to a close. Thanks to your help, we've raised over $250,000 for continued operations, about one-third of our total goal. Because of this we've been able to complete and release our SETI@home Enhanced application. In addition, in June we will be going to Arecibo to install the new Multi-beam data recorder. If you haven't yet donated, please do.
    8 May 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We've started distributing work for a new version of SETI@home called
    SETI@home Enhanced.
    4 May 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Last evening a problem developed on the scheduler host that caused
    work distribution to slow and then stop. This has been fixed. However,
    the number of unsent results is low so work distribution may still be
    spotty for a while. This will correct itself.

    26 Apr 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@Home Chief Scientist Dan Werthimer will be giving a free, public
    talk about SETI and SETI@Home today on the UC Berkeley campus at 1pm.
    You're invited to join him in Room 120 Latimer Hall on campus.
    Also, the SETI Lab will be open for visiting and short tours between
    11:00am and 3:00pm.
    That's in Room 325 at the Space Sciences Laboratory behind the
    University.
    22 Apr 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We're not sure what they're for,
    but 'kinhull' made a set of
    SETI@home stamps.
    Also, Marco Sunder recorded a song
    Don't you hear us?
    about elusive aliens.

    18 Apr 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Our regular Wednesday maintenance outage has been moved to Tuesdays beginning this week. We're doing this to accomodate a number of scheduling conflicts that prevented all of the engineers from being available during the outages.
    17 Apr 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We're now over $225,000 so far during our
    first annual fundraising drive. Thank you for your
    help so far! Please help us reach our goal by
    contributing today.
    4 Apr 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    BOINCstats.com is one of
    several excellent web sites showing the statistics
    of SETI@home and other BOINC projects.
    It's available in a number of languages, now including
    Chinese.

    3 Apr 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Added a link detailing future plans
    to the about SETI@home page.
    9 Mar 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Our master science database has been checked and is OK. We
    are (as of yesterday evening) sending out new work.
    4 Mar 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Our master science database recovered from an unexpected
    power outage Tuesday morning, but we are still in the process
    of thoroughly checking the data.
    More in Technical News.
    3 Mar 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    BOINCcast
    is the first German Podcast about BOINC.
    Weekly episodes of 5 minutes length will explain Distributed Computing
    and the Goals of BOINC to the German public,
    and will present and explain the projects that use BOINC.

    19 Feb 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss


    BOINC and Climateprediction.net have joined forces with the BBC
    to launch a new experiment, a full simulation of climate change
    from 1920 to 2080, described on
    a BBC television documentary Meltdown
    (BBC-4, February 20th, for UK BOINCers).
    SETI@home participants can attach to
    http://bbc.cpdn.org
    (be warned that a 160-year climate simulation is a long workunit even
    by Climateprediction.net's extravagant standards).

    14 Feb 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    BOINC lets you mix in other scientific computing with SETI@home.
    For example, check out
    SIMAP,
    a new project from the Technical University of Munich.
    SIMAP calculate similarities between proteins,
    and supplies the resulting data
    to many bioinformatics research projects.
    Or join the
    SZTAKI Desktop Grid,
    from the MTA-SZTAKI Laboratory of Parallel
    and Distributed Systems in Budapest, Hungary, which is attempting
    to find all the generalized binary number systems.

    6 Feb 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We finished our science database merge (consolidating all
    data from Classic SETI@home and SETI@home/BOINC) and are
    back online serving workunits. Our servers may be overly
    busy trying to create/send work for a day or two. More
    information in Technical News.
    20 Jan 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    It looks like we may be experiencing local SSL network
    problems again. If so, this will likely be fixed tomorrow.
    Today is a university holiday. In the meantime there will
    be intermittent problems contacting the scheduling server.
    16 Jan 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home Classic users: if you've been unable to link
    your BOINC and Classic accounts (with the error message
    'No SETI@home/BOINC account with Classic
    ID xxxx was found') please try again;
    we fixed a bug in the script.
    14 Jan 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    There have been numerous but very brief network drop outs over the past few days
    affecting all of the Space Sciences Lab. This turned out
    to be a problem with the SSL firewall and is hopefully fixed
    at this point.
    13 Jan 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The final SETI@home Classic work totals have been
    copied to SETI@home/BOINC, and are shown on User Pages.
    5 Jan 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The outage is over, but there will be a long period of time
    as our servers work hard to catch up. Connectivity will be
    intermittent as we return to normal.
    More about it in Technical News.
    5 Jan 2006, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Yesterday we stopped accepting results for SETI@home Classic.
    The Classic project stats are now frozen.

    23 Dec 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    A story
    about SETI@home's transition to BOINC     appears in the Nature web site.
    15 Dec 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    After 6 years of operation,
    SETI@home Classic sent out its last workunit.
    We will clean up and synchronize the Classic stats with the current
    SETI@home project in the coming weeks.
    Thanks to all SETI@home Classic participants for their
    tremendous dedication to the project.
    You made SETI@home into something of lasting significance.



    Read a brief history of SETI@home.

    15 Dec 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are now successfully recovering from a week of server
    connection problems. Some connections may still break, but
    most are getting through at this time.
    We will be extending the deadline for returning results so that
    the troubles with the result upload handler will not result in
    lost credit. More in Technical News.
    13 Dec 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Windows users: if you were having problems attaching to SETI@home,
    please download new client software (5.2.12) and try again.
    We have fixed some problems involving personal Internet Firewalls.
    26 Nov 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    You can now attach to SETI@home using your account key,
    without setting a password first.
    (This is a server change - no client download needed.)
    26 Nov 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are getting reports of problems attaching to SETI@home,
    and are working to resolve them.


    Please go to the
    Questions and Answers area for help.

    25 Nov 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We recently had some problems with busy web servers. This is
    clearing up now. More info in Technical News.
    22 Nov 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The official SETI@home Certificate frame
    is on sale for $34.95!
    Get one before they're gone.
    18 Nov 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The old SETI@home Classic project
    will stop issuing work on December 15, 2005.
    Anyone still running SETI@home Classic should deactivate it
    and install SETI@home/BOINC (see instructions under
    'Getting started' on this page).
    15 Nov 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Tomorrow we will start merging the SETI@home classic
    science database with SETI@home/BOINC. This will take
    several days, during which some back-end servers will be offline
    (splitters and assimilators). We stored up a large queue of
    work - we are hoping this will keep all BOINC clients occupied
    during the outage.
    Progress will be detailed in Technical News.
    14 Nov 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Give your computer some variety - check out
    Rosetta@home.
    This new BOINC-based project aims to solve the ab initio
    protein structure prediction problem,
    and to design new chemical catalysts and potential HIV vaccines.
    Participants who found the lowest energy structures have already
    been acknowledged in a scientific paper describing the results.
    1 Nov 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Version 5.2 of the BOINC client software has been released.
    It lets you attach to projects,
    and log in to their web sites,
    using email address and password, instead of account key.
    Users have not chosen a password may do so
    here.
    26 Oct 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Our upload/download server is no longer dropping connections.
    We had the validators off overnight to hasten the recovery.
    They are now back on.
    14 Oct 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Our upload/download server has been dropping connections
    since yesterday's regular outage. We are not yet sure
    what the bottleneck is. It may be that our load of
    old-but-undeleted results and workunits has passed some
    threshold. We'll be cleaning this up parallel to normal
    operations. At this point, the connection drop rate is
    decreasing and should reach zero by the end of the day (PDT).
    13 Oct 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Rocky Cudd, a long-time SETI@home participant
    and active community member, passed away recently.
    We honor him as User of the Day.
    He'll be remembered.
    27 Sep 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    SETI pioneer Carl Sagan's groundbreaking series COSMOS
    is returning to television on The Science Channel.
    The first two episodes premiere on Tuesday Sept. 27
    at 9 and 10 PM (ET/PT),
    with subsequent episodes airing every Tuesday night at 9 PM.
    20 Sep 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Message board postings and user profiles have been converted
    from HTML to BBCode. You might need to tweak your profile
    to make it look right.
    20 Sep 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Now when you donate to SETI@home,
    a will appear next to your user name
    on this web site (unless you choose to remain anonymous).
    9 Sep 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Outage Notice: We are still in the middle of an outage
    to reconfigure our upload/download file systems - the copying
    of data is taking longer than expected.
    Uploads and downloads will be unavailable at this time.
    This should vastly improve our general system performance.
    More information in Technical News.
    9 Sep 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home Classic will process its
    two billionth workunit today.
    Congratulations to everyone for this achievement.
    6 Sep 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    A number of accounts were accidentally deleted on August 26,
    causing users to get 'Invalid or missing account key' messages.
    These accounts have now been restored.
    We apologize for the inconvenience.
    3 Sep 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Most of the servers are back up, but still dropping a lot
    of connections as we recover from a week-long outage.
    More information in Technical News.
    31 Aug 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    You can now log in to this web site using
    your email address and a password of your choice.
    Set your password here,
    BOINC is being changed to use email/password
    instead of account keys (the long random strings)
    to identify accounts.
    This is detailed
    here.

    26 Aug 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Outage Notice. Starting on Monday, August 22, we will be having
    daily 3 hour outages for a few days. This will allow us to clear
    the upload directory of old results. The outages will begin at 17:00
    UTC. See Technical News.
    19 Aug 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Outage Notice. We have gotten word that there will be a 2 hour lab wide outage
    starting August 19 at 01:00. That's just in a few hours. The outage is to repair
    a faulty router. The web site and the scheduler will be off the air.
    18 Aug 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Outge Notice. We will be having a 1 hour outage tomorrow starting
    at 17:00 UTC
    to test the deletion of old result files. See Technical News.
    17 Aug 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    There is a hardware problem with the building network here
    at SSL. This is affecting the scheduling and web servers. You
    may see intermittent connection problems. The SSL network
    folks are working on a fix.
    11 Aug 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are just now coming out of our regular weekly outage (which
    took a bit longer than expected). More news eventually be posted
    in Technical News. Until then, servers
    may be clogged as the backlog of work clears.
    10 Aug 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are back up after the power outage. Some backend services
    will remain off until the initial demand dies down.
    7 Aug 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Outage notice:
    We will be having a 14 hour outage, starting this Sunday (August 7)
    at 02:00 UTC, because of major electrical work being done at the lab.
    4 Aug 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We recently made a DNS switch affecting the scheduler. This and more
    can be read about in detail in Technical News.
    26 Jul 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are looking for ways to boost workunit production See
    Technical News.
    At the current time the system having difficulty meeting
    demand a number of clients are getting No Work from Project
    messages.

    22 Jul 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We now have the new data server online. It has 3x the capacity of the
    old one. Details will be appearing in Technical News.
    This should help clear the backlog of result uploads.

    19 Jul 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are still trying to figure out if there is a software reason
    for the connection drops that are causing the upload and download
    failures. We are also working on a hardware solution in the
    form of a more powerful data server machine. There are several
    steps to getting a new machine online but, barring any show stoppers,
    we hope to have it online in the next day or so.

    19 Jul 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The data server is continuing to drop connections, which is very unusual
    this long after an outage. We are working to figure out why.
    15 Jul 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We safely restarted the project after an all-night (planned) power outage.
    It will take significant time for the servers to catch up. More info in
    Technical News.
    12 Jul 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Read the new Planetary Society newsletter:
    Analyzing Signals
    in Real Time    .
    7 Jul 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We had a four-hour outage this morning for database backup and UPS maintenance (one hour longer
    than expected).
    6 Jul 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The file upload handler crashed last night, but is back up and running now.
    30 Jun 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    BOINC statistics sites continue to evolve.
    Check out Every Earthly Hour, developed by Hydnum Repandum
    25 Jun 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Update: Today's outage is postponed with the date TBD.
    23 Jun 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Outage Notice. We will be having an outage tomorrow for UPS
    maintenance. This will start at 17:00 UTC and should not
    last more than an hour.
    22 Jun 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have released the SETI@home application version 4.18 for windows
    and Mac OS X. Graphics are now available for Mac OS X.
    The Windows release fixes an ATI graphics bug.
    22 Jun 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Outage Notice. We will be having an outage tomorrow in order to back up
    the database. The outage will start at 17:00 UTC and last two to three
    hours.
    21 Jun 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Outage Notice. We will be having an outage tomorrow in order to add an
    index to the result table in the seti/boinc database. This index will
    be used to better track client errors.
    The outage will begin at 17:30 UTC and may last up to 2 hours.
    16 Jun 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are switching the http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ URL
    to point here.
    The SETI@home Classic web site has been moved to
    http://seticlassic.ssl.berkeley.edu.
    1 Jun 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The science database has been successfully relocated. The splitters and assimilator are
    back online.
    26 May 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The splitters and assimilator are offline for a day or so while we relocate
    the backend science database.
    24 May 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The DB reinit went fine. But then we had a problem with a recently installed
    software firewall. It was working when we left the lab yesterday but cut
    off the data service interface a short time later. We have switched off this
    firewall for now. Software firewalls are now required for all machines by
    campus policy but we will get an exception until ours is working. Note that
    we are, and always have been, behind a hardware firewall that works great.
    Given the length of this outage, service will be slow with lots of connection
    drops until the backlog is cleared.
    29 Apr 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We will be having a general outage tomorrow to do a database backup and to
    reinitialize our replica database server. The replica became corrupt last
    week due to a disk space issue. After this is done, we should not have to
    have outages for backups. We will start at 17:00 UTC. The outage will last
    several hours.
    27 Apr 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    In memoriam: Philip Morrison.
    Professor Morrison pioneered the concept of interstellar communication in 1959, creating the field of SETI.
    Phil will be deeply missed by the Berkeley SETI team.
    25 Apr 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    There is an excellent document about the European connectivity issue along
    with work around proxy information here.
    Appreciation goes to setiathomer tigher for putting together this page and to many
    others on the messages boards for contributing information.
    20 Apr 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have confirmed that there is a known network peering issue between Cogent
    (our ISP) and OpenTransit (France Telcom) that is affecting connectivity for
    many participants in Europe. Campus has opened a trouble ticket with Cogent
    but we are unsure that this will result in a fix. We will post news items as
    we learn more. Many thanks go to the posters in this message board thread for their diagnostics and work arounds.
    18 Apr 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    There are reports of a connectivity problem between some parts of Europe and
    our Cogent facing server. We are making inquires. For discussion of the problem
    and a suggested workaround using proxies, see
    this message board thread.
    17 Apr 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Volunteers have ported SETI@home and BOINC to
    a variety of platforms,
    including Solaris/x86-64, Linux/x86-64, Linux/PPC, HP-UX, and FreeBSD.
    11 Apr 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    You can now
    select a language for this site
    without changing your browser's language preference.
    4 Apr 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have temporarily taken down 4.10;
    it did not solve the graphics problem.
    2 Apr 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have released version 4.10 of the SETI@home application for Windows.
    This release fixes a bug that caused graphics not to display.
    1 Apr 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Now you can print a
    SETI@home Certificate of Computation
    that shows your Classic work, BOINC work, or both.
    While you're at it, support SETI@home and
    buy an Official SETI@home Certificate Frame.

    29 Mar 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home Classic participants: you can now
    activate your SETI@home/BOINC account
    (with your Classic work totals)
    even if the email address of your Classic account
    is no longer valid.

    23 Mar 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We're now fully back on-line. More information about
    recent outages can be found in Technical News.
    22 Mar 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Our Internet link through Cogent went down at around
    midnight UTC on March 18/19. It was repaired this evening, and the
    servers may be bogged down as they try to make up for lost time.
    We'll post more information once we're told what happened.
    Please note that we still plan to have an outage tomorrow
    morning (see message below).
    21 Mar 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The project will be down for 4 hours this coming
    Tuesday, March 22, starting at 14:00 UTC. Our building
    will be without power as campus tries to find the reason
    for the power losses we experienced a couple of weeks
    ago.
    18 Mar 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    In preparation for shutting down SETI@home Classic
    (in about 1 month, hopefully)
    we're trying to make sure that SETI@home Classic accounts
    are linked to the proper SETI@home/BOINC account.
    This is a bit complicated because of email address changes.
    See our current transition plan.
    17 Mar 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have cleaned up our account database,
    merging accounts with conflicting email addresses.
    This may cause some users to get 'Invalid or missing account key'
    messages. This is easy to fix;
    instructions are here.
    17 Mar 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have updated the SETI@home/BOINC database
    with current information from SETI@home Classic.
    16 Mar 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Official SETI@home Certificate frames
    are now available!
    12 Mar 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Star Trek is going off the air!
    Read
    here how Star Trek Helped Launch SETI@home    .
    9 Mar 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    All services are up and graceful shutdown in case of
    a power outage is in place.
    7 Mar 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Around 18:00 UTC we had another unexpected lab-wide power outage.
    The cause of these random failures is being investigated by campus,
    but all our systems/databases survived without any corruption. We will
    be down as we work to further protect ourselves. More info and updates in
    Technical News.
    28 Feb 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The database has been restored and all services are back up.
    The data server is very busy right now. There will be upload
    and download problems until the load normalizes.
    More info in Technical News.

    25 Feb 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Update: a breaker blew and the power for the entire lab was off for
    several hours. Power returned at 23:30 UTC, but we will be dealing
    with fallout for a while - the project will probably be down all night and
    through tomorrow morning. More info in Technical News.
    23 Feb 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are looking for volunteers to translate
    the SETI@home web site into non-English languages.
    If you're interested, learn more.
    21 Feb 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    For data server updates, see Technical News.
    20 Feb 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The Einstein@home
    project was officially launched this morning.
    We encourage SETI@home users to also participate in this project,
    which searches for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars)
    using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors.

    19 Feb 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are still dealing with a data server storage problem. The project will
    be going up and down as we work on this. See Technical News.
    19 Feb 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Update. Yet another data server array hang. The vendor is looking into it.



    The project has been up for several hours although the data server
    is a bit overwhelmed with pent up demand. We are adding services
    back one at a time while we monitor the data server storage array.
    18 Feb 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Update. Once the RAID rebuilds we are going to run a job to delete
    old workunits and results from the array. These would normally be deleted
    by the file deleter but the latter is still backed up from before the database
    migration. The project will remain off through all of this.



    The data server failed around 20:30 UTC for the third time in as many days.
    The project will be down as we continue to diagnose the problem.
    17 Feb 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The RAID resync is complete and the project is up, although
    the data server is a bit overwhelmed at the moment. In positive
    news, the new database server is running great (today's malfunction
    was not on that machine).
    15 Feb 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have moved the primary database service over to the the new system.
    See Technical News.
    10 Feb 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The initial migration of the database to the new server is complete.
    Tomorrow we will make this new server a database replica. If all
    goes well it will become the database primary in a few days.
    7 Feb 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We will restart the database migration to the new hardware
    Monday, February 7, at 18:00 UT. The outage will be several hours
    long.
    Currently, workunit production is falling behind demand. The
    splitters themselves are able to keep up but are not able to insert
    work fast enough because of competition for database access.
    4 Feb 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The project was offline most of the day today due to a
    database problem.
    3 Feb 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have created a new
    SETI@home bookstore
    in partnership with Alibris.com.
    Find great books, read about science (fact and fiction),
    and benefit SETI@home!
    1 Feb 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The DB migration stopped when the new server crashed.
    See Technical News.
    31 Jan 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We will begin the migration to the new hardware at 19:00
    UT tomorrow, 1/31. The project will be down for several
    hours.
    30 Jan 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have turned on db_purge in preparation for the DB
    migration to the new hardware. This will reduce the
    size of the DB and so the migration will go faster.
    The validator will probably fall even more
    behind in the meantime. The migration will occur early
    next week. We will post the time once we have pinned it down
    28 Jan 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Due to recent database problems, we had to turn off
    XML stats generation for the time being.
    26 Jan 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We're looking for a Certificate of Appreciation
    design based on the new SETI@home logo.
    If you know PHP and do graphic design,
    maybe you can help.
    20 Jan 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The validation backlog is slowly clearing. There appears to
    be no problem with validation other than the slowness the backlog
    itself is causing.

    6 Jan 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are still running a backlog of results waiting to be validated
    and are looking into it.

    4 Jan 2005, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The waiting for validation/transition counts on the
    server status page are disabled
    until we diagnose a recent DB slowdown.

    31 Dec 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have decided to send out 4 copies of each workunit
    and use a quorum size of 3 for validation.
    Validation should be quick because a single result in error
    will not delay reaching a quorum.

    28 Dec 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have started removing database records for results
    that were completed more than 7 days ago.
    This will limit the size of the workunit and result tables
    in our database.
    Happy holidays!

    27 Dec 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are experimenting with redundancy parameters.
    We will continue to send 3 copies of each workunit,
    but will validate results and grant credit
    when 2 (rather than 3) of them are returned.
    This should result in faster validation.

    27 Dec 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The project will be down for roughly the next 24 hours
    while make some changes to the database structure.
    [ Good news - changes are all done, and it only took 2 hours ].

    6 Dec 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Versions of BOINC and SETI@home for Solaris/x86
    are available,
    courtesy of Jochen van Waasen.
    21 Nov 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Windows application version 4.08 is released.
    It should fix the graphics preferences problem.
    19 Nov 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We had an unexpected 3 hour outage this morning. More info
    in Technical News.
    18 Nov 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home application version 4.07 is released.
    This build should increase speed over the previous version.

    5 Nov 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The disk array has resynced and the scheduler is back on.

    27 Oct 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The disk array holding the upload/download directories crashed
    last night. Until we are able to reboot and resync the drives,
    the scheduler will be off (i.e. your clients won't be able to
    connect to our servers). More details
    in Technical News.
    27 Oct 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    There was a two hour outage this morning for hardware upgrades.
    Read more about it in Technical News.
    20 Oct 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home and BOINC are featured on Catalan TV news.
    See the
    Movie
    (RealVideo) or the English transcript.

    19 Oct 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Each team now has a Create team account URL.
    Accounts created through this URL will belong to the team,
    and will have the project preferences of its founder.
    Team founders: put this URL on your team's web page.

    18 Oct 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The web server was offline for a brief time (around 19:00 PST)
    when its disk filled up. Files were cleaned up, old logs removed,
    and everything is back to normal.
    17 Oct 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    For the first time in a very long time the validator has caught up
    on the large backlog of results waiting for credit. Of course, many
    results still have pending credit until similar results are returned
    by other users (and therefore cannot be validated yet).
    16 Oct 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Version 4.13 of the core client is now available. Version 4.12, which
    contained various bug fixes, including one pertaining to file upload
    problems, was released two days ago. Version 4.13 contains an
    additional bug fix involving a rare case where user permissions
    weren't being understood correctly by the client.
    14 Oct 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We added more data and informative text to our
    Server Status page.
    13 Oct 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We just had (about 21:00 UTC) an unexpected outage due to a disk
    crash. Everything is back up now.
    12 Oct 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Read more technical details about our project in the new
    Technical News section.
    12 Oct 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    This morning's outage lasted a bit longer than expected, but we are
    now back up and running again. The outage was for reconfiguration
    of the new replica database.
    12 Oct 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We added some new message-board features.
    9 Oct 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    A problem with file uploads has existed for the last few days.
    This problem causes file uploads to fail.
    We now understand the problem and are working on a fix -
    it will probably require upgrading your BOINC client.
    Please stay tuned.
    9 Oct 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    This morning a hardware failure caused one of our storage arrays
    to require resetting.
    Downloads will be temporarily halted until the drives have
    completed re-synchronizing.
    This should be complete in the early evening hours (Pacific Time).
    8 Oct 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    There's been a problem with file uploading
    for the last few days.
    We think it is fixed now.
    Our apologies if you lost work because of this.
    6 Oct 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The disk array holding the upload and download directories
    failed yesterday and needed to be rebooted and resync'ed.
    The project has been mostly down since last night, but as of
    now it is back up and running.
    6 Oct 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    UPDATED: We successfully swapped our database hardware, giving the
    master database access to much faster disks. Within a couple hours
    weeks-old queues drained completely. We're not completley done with
    the swap, but all parts of the BOINC system are back up and running
    full blast.
    5 Oct 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    UPDATED: A new version (4.05) of the windows SETI@home client is available
    (and will be automatically picked up by your core clients next time you
    contact our servers). Changes include: the "heads up" mode now works and the
    progress bar advances in a more linear fashion.

    Earlier today we released a similar version 4.04 which gave users
    checksum errors and failed to run. This has been fixed in 4.05.
    30 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Learn how to customize SETI@home graphics.
    29 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    A software error on our scheduling server made it impossible for any
    schedulers to start. Clients were unable to connect
    since yesterday afternoon. We tracked down the bug this morning and
    fixed it. You should be able to connect to the schedulers now, though
    there may be heavy traffic for a while (as the backlog clears up)
    preventing you from getting through right away.
    28 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The upload directory move completed this morning and we turned the
    file deleter and validator back on.
    26 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have relocated the upload directory to off load demand from the DB
    server. We are currently moving all of the old upload files (results)
    to the new location. Until the move is complete the file deleter, validator and
    assimilator need to be off.
    24 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The scheduler is back on. We are still investigating the transitioner lag.
    23 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Both the transitioner and the validator have fallen behind. We are
    determining whether this situation is because of a software or hardware
    bottleneck. In the meantime we need to allow these programs to catch up so the
    scheduler is off over night. We are in the process of obtaining faster hardware
    for DB server.
    22 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The upload of user-profile images
    has been broken since July 22; it's fixed now.
    21 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Early this morning campus got a call from SANS that the seti@home classic web site
    appeared to be hijacked. At that point campus (rightly so) blocked access
    to our site at the campus router. As it turns out though, we were not
    hijacked at all. Our nightly front page regen script had malfunctioned and
    produced a truncated page. This is now fixed.
    19 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have released a new version of the core client for all
    platforms, this should fix the various issues with the
    Win9x platform.

    NOTE: If you are using a Win9x machine, please upgrade
    to this release as soon as possible.
    17 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have added
    a web page showing server status.
    The permanent link is under
    Participate in SETI@home.
    14 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    SETI@home is open source,
    so you can port it to new platforms
    or optimize it for specific architectures.
    We have set up an mailing list,
    boinc_opt@ssl.berkeley.edu, for people interested in this.
    Details are
    here.
    14 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Sometime last night the scheduling server (which handles all workunit/result
    transfers) crashed. We're looking into what exactly
    happened, but in the meantime it has been restarted and data is being
    sent/returned normally.
    13 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The validator fix (see September 8, 2004) and an associated
    transitioner fix have been implemented, tested, and placed
    online. Credits are flowing.
    10 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have added a number of new features to the message boards.
    Details are here.
    Thanks to Janus Kristensen for contributing this.
    10 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Stats are now available on your cell phone.
    See 'Your Account' for the URL.
    This feature was developed by Carl Christensen of CPDN.
    9 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Yesterday we discovered that when result files are lost, say due
    to a restore from a backup (restores involve both the DB and the ULDL
    directories) the validator ends up in a endless loop. The entire result
    set for an affected workunit gets ignored and after a while the validator
    ends up enumerating only affected workunits and is thus in a loop. We
    turned off the validator when we discovered this. Today we have coded
    a fix and are testing it in the alpha project. While the validator is off
    credits are not given but they should show up once we turn the validator
    back on.


    The snap server continues to run well.
    8 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We came up this morning and had to tune the data server to
    keep connection drops from happening. The download/md5 errors
    should no longer be occurring.
    7 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Because of the holiday weekend and family commitments we are
    a bit short handed and short on time. So the uldl move is
    taking us longer than expected.
    5 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The SnapApp folks were here for most of the afternoon. They replaced
    the processors with ones that are faster and have larger caches. More
    importantly, we talked about how to stabilize the system. The plan is
    to simplify both the HW and service mix as much as possible in the hopes
    of removing the variable that is causing the hangs (and of course they will
    be going for the root cause at their lab). We altered the startup
    so that a bare minimal set of services are running. And we are going to
    only use the 18000 head unit for now, keeping no data on the sd30 expansion.
    This means moving some data around. We first have to move the upload/download
    data to a temporary volume on the sd30, then reconfigure the space on the
    18000 head, then move the uldl to the head. The move to the temp volume
    is happening now. Tomorrow morning we will do the reconfiguration and
    start final move. With luck we will have the project up by EOD tomorrow.
    3 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Some technical folks from Snap Appliance are on their way
    to SSL to provide on site support. They will likely swap
    out the CPUs.
    3 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The Snap App hung again. We will be down for the night.
    2 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have completed the SnapApp work around. We had a bit of a scare
    with a volume mounting issue but once again Snap App gave us great
    support and all seems fine at this point.
    2 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We will be having a short (less than 1 hour) data server
    outage tomorrow at 16:30 UTC. We will be implementing the
    Snap Applicance work around on the 18000.
    1 Sep 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Our storage array hung again (the SnapApp work around is not
    yet implemented). It has not yet responded to a reboot command.
    Data service may well be off until we can hard reset it tomorrow
    morning.
    30 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are investigating the Win98 hang/crashing issues in this
    Thread
    Please check it out for any updates.

    NOTE: This bug puts your machine in a state that causes you
    to reset your machine in order to be able to use it, this in turn can
    cause disk corruption. We recommend that you hold off executing BOINC
    on Win98 and WinME until this issue is resolved.
    30 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Climateprediction.net,
    another BOINC-based project, is now open.
    We urge all SETI@home to consider participating in
    Climateprediction.net.
    This will keep your computer busy (and earning credit)
    even when SETI@home has no work available.
    30 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Starting with version 4, BOINC does 'time-slicing'
    to divide CPU time between projects.
    Learn more
    here.
    30 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are back up after restarting the Snap Appliance and making sure
    everything is OK. We had a long conference call with the engineers
    at Snap this morning they have come up with a work around as well as
    a potential fix that should end the system hangs. Thanks go to the
    Snap App folks for working very hard on this problem.

    During all of this some web site files were lost and these are being
    restored now.
    30 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    A fix to scheduler code to get around a possible memory leak
    was causing it to bomb after a number of connections.
    We have backed out this change for
    now and the scheduler seems to be working OK at this point.
    29 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    After fixing a few inevitable gotchas,
    we are back up with the major version upgrade to 4.x.
    The servers may be slow in responding as all clients will be
    getting a new supply of work.
    Everyone will need to download a new core client.
    29 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The migration plan has been rescheduled for tomorrow the 29th at 10am PDT. We
    have brought down the scheduler and file upload handler until the migration
    happens to give the splitters and transitioners time to produce enough workunits
    and results to send out after the migration when the clients reset themselves.
    28 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The last set of hardware issues have been resolved. Due to the time of
    day and other factors the upgrade will be delayed until at least tomorrow
    morning. We'll post the revised schedule as soon as plans have been firmed up.
    27 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are currently experiencing a hardware issue with our scheduling server,
    we expect this issue to be resolved within the hour. The upgrade to 4.x will
    start around 11am PDT and will take roughly an hour. Anybody who has any
    remaining results to report should get them in before the upgrade.
    After the
    upgrade you'll need the 4.x clients to report new results, and upgrading to
    the 4.x client will reset the project on your machine. Roughly 100,000
    results are queued up and ready to be sent out after the upgrade, plus the
    three splitters will be up and running producing work as quickly as possible.
    27 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We fixed the bogus URL bug and all servers are back up. If your cache is
    empty of all valid workunits and you have any of the bogus workunits, then
    reset the project.
    26 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have brought down the splitters, transitioners, and scheduler until a
    bug in the splitter can be resolved which was causing a bogus URL to be
    posted for the work-unit.
    26 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    A trio of splitters are now up and producing new work.

    We plan to release major version 4 of BOINC and SETI@Home
    tomorrow.

    A clarification about last week's fallback to an earlier
    DB state: all work that was uploaded during the period of
    August 13th to 18th
    was lost and so cannot be credited. As well, all work that
    was generated and downloaded during that period was lost to the DB and so cannot
    be credited. This work is being regenerated and redistributed.
    25 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The validator is up and running and credit is now being calculated
    for all those backlogged results.
    23 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are currently working on getting the alpha/beta projects working again, as well
    as getting new workunits generated so that when we restart the public SETI@home project
    there will be work to send out to the clients.

    Another note about the database restoration: All user profile/preferences updates
    between August 13th and 18th were lost as well.
    20 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The database has been restored and is being checked now. You may notice
    that message board posts made in the past week are now missing - this is because
    we had to fall back to an earlier copy of the database. Sorry for the
    inconvenience.
    19 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are now recovering the database from a snapshot made
    a few days ago. This process will continue through tomorrow.
    18 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The project ended up running all night despite the dropouts, but this
    afternoon we encountered a sudden raid failure that caused some data
    corruption. The project will remain down until we recover the database.
    17 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Currently the project is up, as we were unable to recreate the
    problems we were seeing on Friday. Now there are occasional dropouts,
    but nothing devastating. We will keep everything running for the
    time being, but may have to stop if problems arise.
    16 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Today we are continuing to work with Snap technical support to
    solve our mounting problems. In the meantime, you may notice the
    project being started/stopped for brief periods as part of our
    testing.
    16 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We encourage everyone to run SETI@home Classic
    during our server outages.
    SETI@home Classic makes the same scientific contribution
    as SETI@home/BOINC.
    14 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    All the data has been copied to the Snap device. Both attempts to
    bring the project online met with an unexpected NFS issue. Roughly
    ten minutes after bringing the project online the NFS daemon drops
    the mount point. Hats off to the Snap technical support team who
    have been helping us work through this issue. We are still
    investigating this issue and don't expect to be back online until
    the beginning of next week. In the meantime everyone have a great
    weekend.
    13 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The download directory is fully transferred at this point, but we
    are still waiting for the upload directory to finish. We predict
    it will finish late in the evening, and we'll start the project
    fresh tomorrow morning.
    12 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The DB is now on the Snap Appliance and the web site is back up.
    The project itself is still down as the transfer of the upload and
    download directories is still under way.
    12 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The project is now down for the move of the DB and the upload
    directory to the Snap Appliance. Along with the still running
    download move, this will be a long process. We hope to be back
    up midday tomorrow.
    11 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have started the copy of the download directory to the Snap
    Appliance 18000.
    10 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The servers are back up as far as receiving results but not as
    far as distributing new workunits. We are simultaneously clearing
    out the old download directory and preparing to move both it and the
    upload directory to the Snap Appliance, along with the DB.

    Allowing result uploads will ultimately speed both the deletion
    of old workunits and results and the granting of credit. Credit
    for the backlog of results will start being granted once we move
    to the Snap Appliance and turn on the hierarchical directory structure.
    8 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The scheduling server is down while we work on a download storage
    problem. This may take a day or so.
    7 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We developed a hierarchical directory structure to get around the
    big directory problem (see August 4, below). This solution is backward
    compatible with all current work units. It is being tested
    in alpha now. Next week it will go to beta and then to public.
    We also have a tool to distribute all recent results into the
    new hierarchy. When that tool is run, credit will appear for
    all of these results. The credit appearance will be spread over
    a number of days.
    In other news, we have the SnapAppliance 18000 configured. It
    shows a 10x speed up over the software RAID we are now using. We
    are awaiting a UPS for it.
    6 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    A misconfigured scheduling server ran for about an hour this morning,
    misinforming users that they had to upgrade to version 4 of the
    BOINC software. This message was in error - please remain with version 3.
    5 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We discovered that the sheer number of files in the upload directory
    was killing NFS performance for the file_upload_handler. We started
    with a new empty upload directory and the file_upload_handler performed
    much better. The rate of connection drops on the upload server dropped
    to zero (most of the time). Of course we need to get all those older
    results back into play somehow.
    We are preparing our new SnapAppliance 18000 to host the database. We
    need to fit it into the power load in our already fairly full data
    closet, configure the DB volume, run some tests, and then copy over
    the DB files. We will post the progress as we go.
    4 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    While the project is up and functioning normally, the database and
    web servers are overloaded. Because of this you may have noticed
    difficulty in transferring work and loading certain web pages.
    We're tuning these servers and trying to find the bottlenecks now.
    3 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The project remained down all weekend, but we are back up now.
    To add insult to injury, the entire lab lost network connectivity
    to the rest of the world for a few hours this morning.
    In light of the unexpected length of this last outage, we are looking
    into mechanisms that allow us to keep certain parts of the
    project up while others remain down for repair.
    2 Aug 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The project is *still* down. The database cleanup for the bug
    found on July 28 is going much slower than expected. We hope to
    have everything back up later today or early tomorrow. Sorry for
    the inconvenience!
    30 Jul 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The project is currently down. We found a bug in the scheduling
    code such that returned results were not being updated in the
    database. We are now running a fix script on the DB, marking
    each affected result as unsent so that it will be resent.
    Unfortunately, credit was not given for results affected by the
    bug.
    28 Jul 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have shutdown the schedulers and file upload handlers so the transitioners
    can play catch up again. The transitioners keep falling behind because the DB
    is I/O bound. We believe that the new hardware we have coming online will
    resolve this issue. Until it is online we'll be continuing these rolling
    blackout style server outages.
    25 Jul 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The project is down while we deal with a backup problem. We hope to be
    back up soon.
    25 Jul 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The good news is that the scheduler is now running as a fast cgi
    which means it maintains a persistent connection to the DB. The
    load on the scheduling server has gone way down which is a good
    thing and the mysql server is using more CPU which is also a good
    thing. The bad news is that the transitioner is still way behind
    and so the project will probably run out of send-able work as
    early as 04:00 UT tomorrow. The transitioner is slow because the
    mysql server is IO bound. We are having Sun look at our IO system
    to see if it can be tuned to better performance. At the same time
    we are planning on moving the physical DB to a high performance Snap
    Appliance box in the near future. So we are hopeful that these IO
    problems can be solved.
    23 Jul 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are now up and running again, during the night we generated 400k
    results to be sent out. Things might be a bit weird for awhile, somebody
    decided to launch a denial of service attack yesterday afternoon.
    23 Jul 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We found and fixed the no results bug. It was a malformed
    embedded SQL query. But we are leaving the scheduler off
    overnight to let the transitioner work through it's backlog.
    The transitioner works a great deal faster with a small
    backlog and we hope yesterday's changes will go a long
    way in preventing a large backlog from recurring.
    22 Jul 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Yesterday we introduced a bunch of performance enhancements to the
    system. During the course of letting the system run overnight, we have
    detected a bug that keeps results from being sent to hosts. It looks
    at though this bug has only been around for about 13 hours. While we
    are debugging this issue we have decided to shutdown the scheduler
    and try and let the transitioners pick up the pace a bit.
    22 Jul 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The log files are currently being compressed, after thats done the
    project should return to normal.
    21 Jul 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have brought up an additional transitioner to try and cut through
    the backlog we have accrued. Since the beginning of the project we have
    already processed 2.7 million results. For comparison, the beta project
    had only processed 6 million through the whole life of that project to date.
    19 Jul 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Sometime between 5pm and 12am PDT, the splitters seem to have
    stopped producing new workunits. We have restarted the splitters
    and they are back to creating new workunits.
    19 Jul 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    A server bug was preventing
    new results from being created in response to failed results.
    If 2 out of 3 results for a WU succeeded and the 3rd failed,
    the 2 successful results would not be validated or credited.
    This is now fixed and the system will issue new results for
    all workunits in this state.
    17 Jul 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Our database server hung and had to be forcibly terminated.
    It took several hours to check all the tables and indices.
    Then we ran into problems with our
    Network Attached Storage device, which we rebooted
    for the first time in 18 months.
    Additional outages may occur throughout the night and possibly tomorrow.
    13 Jul 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    It looks as though the server components
    (splitter, transitioner, feeder, scheduler)
    are now keeping up with demand.
    9 Jul 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Since yesterday evening we have distributed over
    600,000 results. Thats a six-fold increase in
    overall system performance from our previous best. Now it looks
    as though we'll have occasional workunit shortages as we'll
    have to bring additional splitters online to keep up with demand.
    It's 8:50pm PDT and we have about 30,000 results in the queue, and we
    are sending about 1,000 every 10 minutes. Currently
    the splitters generate 4 workunits per minute which creates 12 results
    per minute.
    8 Jul 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have moved the scheduling server to another machine in
    order to free up CPU and memory for the DB server. Active
    clients will fail 10 times to connect to the old scheduling
    server and then will self correct by contacting the master URL.
    To force the correction right away, simply detach and then
    (re)attach the project.
    8 Jul 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We're making some major changes to deal with
    server performance problems.
    The project will be shut down for several hours today.
    7 Jul 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We made some progress and are turning the project on.
    You may still have problems getting work.
    If that is the case, you might consider switching
    back to SETI@home Classic for the next few days.
    2 Jul 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We've been having problems with server performance.
    To address these problems we're making some changes to our database.
    The project will be shut down most of today while this is being done.
    2 Jul 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Yesterday morning we shut down the front end of the system
    to let the transitioners catch up with several days worth
    of backlogged work, which is why some of you were noticing
    three results and no credit assignment. During the down
    time we also converted the scheduler into a fast-CGI
    application. Upon bringing the system back up the new
    fast-CGI scheduler decided to choke on something that it
    hadn't choked on in Alpha. We are currently debugging the
    new scheduler. We were able to get through 60% of the
    backlogged work.
    30 Jun 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The web site has been reenabled.
    We have several upgrades scheduled throughout
    the week which should help with the performance problems.
    If the project runs out of work again you are welcome to
    revert back to the original SAH client.
    27 Jun 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We passed the safe threshold again,
    so the web site has been shut down until Monday,
    after we have had a chance to relocate some more infrastructure
    services.
    27 Jun 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    An additional transitioner has been brought online.
    We are turning on the web site and will be monitoring the system.
    We may have to shut it down again if traffic becomes too bad.
    We are investigating further performance enhancements.
    27 Jun 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We are going to leave the project down until Monday.
    We are going to bring back up the scheduler in an hour.
    The transitioner was moved to its own machine and is
    processing workunits at a much faster rate.
    26 Jun 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Memory for our web server was defective;
    we are waiting on replacements before bringing it online.
    25 Jun 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The transitioner is not currently able to keep up with the splitters.
    We are going to top the project to allow the
    transitioner a chance to catch up with the rest of the system.
    25 Jun 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We added a second splitter and then hit the next bottleneck which
    was the transitioner.
    25 Jun 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    To handle increased demand for work,
    we are bringing another splitter online.
    24 Jun 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We will be having a short server outage tomorrow at 17:00 UTC.
    23 Jun 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Read about SETI@home's
    transition to BOINC
    23 Jun 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The URL of this project is http://setiathome.berkeley.edu.
    If you joined using a different URL, please detach
    and attach to this URL.
    22 Jun 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Version 3.19 of the BOINC core client for Windows is released.
    Please upgrade.
    22 Jun 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Welcome to the new SETI@home!
    The project is now officially active.
    We've reset the project by deleting all results and workunits,
    and setting all credits (user, team, host) to zero.
    Thanks to everyone who participated in the
    alpha and beta
    tests for their help in debugging SETI@home and BOINC.
    22 Jun 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    Our database server crashed yesterday,
    and it's taken a while for the database to repair itself.
    Some message-board postings and user profiles
    may have been lost.
    22 Jun 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    NOTICE: this project is not officially active.
    Use at your own risk.
    We may delete results and reset credits at any time.
    8 Jun 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    The project was shut down for about 12 hours yesterday
    while we removed the uniqueness constraint on SETI@home classic
    user ID (this was preventing new accounts from being created)
    5 Jun 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    A version of the SETI@home splitter is now feeding
    work to this project.
    28 May 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

    We have created the project and migrated the
    user-related tables from the SETI@home database.
    25 May 2004, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss



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    SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.