1/2/08 - File #17714

Contact: Robert Sanders
1-510-643-6998
rsanders@berkeley.edu

SETI@home ramps up to analyze more data in search of extraterrestrial intelligence

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Berkeley -- The longest-running search for radio signals from alien
civilizations is getting a burst of new data from an upgraded Arecibo telescope,
which means the SETI@home project needs more desktop computers to help crunch
the data.

Since SETI@home launched eight years ago, the project based at the University of
California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory has signed up more than 5
million interested volunteers and boasts the largest community of dedicated
users of any Internet computing project: 170,000 devotees on 320,000 computers.

Yet, new and more sensitive receivers on the world's largest radio telescope in
Arecibo, Puerto Rico, and better frequency coverage are generating 500 times
more data for the project than before. The SETI@home software has been upgraded
to deal with this new data as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) enters
a new era and offers a new opportunity for those who want to help find other
civilizations in the universe.

"The next generation SETI@home is 500 times more powerful then anything anyone
has done before," said project chief scientist Dan Werthimer. "That means we are
500 times more likely to find ET than with the original SETI@home."

According to project scientist Eric Korpela, the new data amounts to 300
gigabytes per day, or 100 terabytes (100,000 gigabytes) per year, about the
amount of data stored in the U.S. Library of Congress. "That's why we need all
the volunteers," he said. "Everyone has a chance to be part of the largest
public participation science project in history."

The 1,000-foot diameter Arecibo dish, which fills a valley in Puerto Rico, is
part of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center operated by Cornell
University with funds from the National Science Foundation. Since 1992,
Werthimer and his team have piggybacked on radio astronomy observations
at Arecibo to record signals from space and analyze them for patterns that
could indicate they were transmitted by an intelligent civilization.

When the team's incoming data overwhelmed its ability to analyze it, the
scientists conceived a distributed computing project to harness many computers
into one big supercomputer to do the analysis. Since SETI@home was launched,
other distributed computing projects have arisen, from folding@home to predict
the three-dimensional tangle of a protein to the newly-launched cosmology@home
to model possible universes. Most are now on a platform called BOINC (Berkeley
Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), which was developed by SETI@home's
director David Anderson so that the various projects could share resources.

"There are now 42 projects on BOINC, and, until now, there has been enough
computing power to go around," Werthimer said.

What triggered the new flow of data was the addition of seven new receivers at
Arecibo, which now allow the telescope to record radio signals from seven
regions of the sky simultaneously instead of just one. With greater sensitivity
and the ability to detect the polarization of the radio signals, plus 40 times
more frequency coverage, Arecibo is set to survey the sky for new radio sources.

These improvements also prime the telescope for an improved search for
intelligent signals from space.

"The multiple receivers help us weed out interference better and make us less
susceptible to thinking that things terrestrial are extraterrestrial," Werthimer
said.

Werthimer noted that, despite the fact that UC Berkeley has been analyzing radio
signals from space since 1978 on various telescopes, no telltale signals from an
intelligent civilization have yet been found.

"Earthlings are just getting started looking at the frequencies in the sky;
we're looking only at the cosmically brightest sources, hoping we are scanning
the right radio channels," he said. "The good news is, we're
entering an era when we will be able to scan billions of channels. Arecibo is
now optimized for this kind of search, so if there are signals out there, we or
our volunteers will find them."

SETI@home has been funded by various organizations over the years, including the
Planetary Society and Sun Microsystems, and continues to be supported by
individual donations from its volunteers.

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NOTE: Dan Werthimer can be reached at 1-510-642-6997 or danw@ssl.berkeley.edu.

Eric Korpela is at 1-510-643-6538 or korpela@ssl.berkeley.edu. David Anderson is
at 1-510-642-4921 or davea@ssl.berkeley.edu.