Roy's Super Toy Shop
presents
O.K. Like I said this has nothing to do with The PRR or Steam engines but I think it deserves some mention. I don't
know if this project will find anything. Maybe we are too low tech to find anything. Maybe we need to build the
next step beyond radio, whatever that is.
In the meanwhile we are trying to find ET using radio.
What does your computer do while you are doing other things?
Set there doing nothing or working full speed drawing pretty lines or other things on the screen?
Why not let it look for ET?
This is not a joke! The University of California at Berkeley is doing just that. They are using a Cray Super computer
to look through the radio signals received by the big radio telescope in Australia. But the amount of data to
be processed is HUGH.
So someone came up with the idea that a Cray was equal to 1000 PC's, and there are millions of PC's out there doing
nothing or next to nothing a lot of the time. If they could 'borrow' a million PC's they would have the equivalent
of 1000 Cray computers.
That's what SETI@HOME is all about. You set up SETI@HOME as your screen saver then when you aren't doing anything,
your computer is looking for ET.
For more info or to start looking for ET click on any of the pretty banners on this page or point your browser
to:
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/
One other thing, it takes a lot of CPU time to make the pretty graphs for the screen saver, so if you don't mind
looking at a blank screen or if you're not going to be there to look at the screen, set the SETI@HOME blank setting
to blank after zero minutes. This speeds up the program by 2 to 4 times.
The program gets data and returns it's finding to Berkeley via the Internet. It can be set to call your ISP or ask you to make the connection for it. If you tell it to ask it will ask even if you are on the Internet when it finishes processing the chunk of data it has.
If you have a newer (P-III or K6) with at least 64 Meg RAM (I started running it on a K5-133 with 32 Meg running all the time) you can set SETI@HOME to run all the time, Remember
your computer is spending most of it's time WAITING for you to press a key. SETI@HOME is very well behaved and
will not slow you down very much (but you can stop it at any time you need your full CPU speed or memory.
If you decide to download the program I suggest you also download SETI MONITOR. This is a free program that watches SETI@HOME and stores anything reported back to Berkeley. There is a link to this program's home page at the SETI@HOME web site.
BTW There are over 3,250,000 users signed up and they get over 100,000 results sent back each day. (I am in the top
3.5% having sent back more results than 96.5% of the total users.)
