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| Personal background |
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My interest in astronomy and "what's out there" goes back a number of years. I welcome Seti@Home as an opportunity to make a real contribution to the search for answers, and I congratulate the people at Seti for their dogged determination to continue this study.
Technical:
We have long since abandoned the screen saver version of Seti@Home in favour of the command line version. On our Windows 2000 machines, we run the program at start-up so it stays in the background, and we have seen no degradation of service even during peak periods.
Since the Seti servers are overloaded, we have found that the majority of time dedicated by our machines was spent trying to connect to upload results and to download new work units. One workstation we monitored completed processing of a work unit in under 5 hours and spent the next 16 hr exchanging the information with the Berkeley servers. So we recently set up a local proxy server (SETIQueue) and maintain our own queue of work units locally. This simple change means we maintain enough work units to remain independent of the Berkeley server for 10 days (the maximum outage we have experienced) and our machines are now turning out results at a significantly higher rate. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Right now, SETI is based on the premise that another civilization will transmit a signal at a meaningful frequency. It is very possible that that other civilization has said 'why bother' or has a different view of what is meaningful.
At some point the sky survey is going to have to monitor different frequencies, in particular lower frequencies which might be used for communications. Hopefully the processing power of the Seti@home users will have grown to meet this demand when it comes. |
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