I'm Looking For Little Green Men With A Big Pink iMac
Written: Sep 10 '00 (Updated May 31 '05)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Worthwhile project, free screen saver, relatively small application, pretty colors!
Cons: A little RAM hungry, data sets take forever if you have an older machine
The Bottom Line: Excellent
|
|
|
| prfstars's Full Review: Archived Computers & Internet Reviews |
Back in 1968, Jocelyn Bell, an astronomy graduate student at Cambridge University, was analyzing some data from a radio telescope when she discovered a regular signal in all of the background noise. She and her advisor, Professor Antony Hewish, jokingly dubbed the source LGM-1.
L - Little
G - Green
M - Men
After doing a little more research, Bell and Hewish (who later won the Nobel prize for this discovery without Bell) determined that the source was actually a pulsar, which is a rapidly rotating neutron star. Their radio signals were not coming from little green men, but it raised an interesting point: if aliens wanted to send us a message, they'd probably use radio signals. More specifically, they'd probably (or at least possibly) use radio signals at a frequency of about 1.42 GHz.
Enter SETI
American astronomers first became interested in searching for extraterrestrial intelligence circa 1960. The field was pioneered by Frank Drake, who actually devised an equation that can be used to predict (albeit with a large margin of error) the number of intelligent, communicating civilizations within the galaxy.
SETI is an acronym for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The United States government began funding SETI programs back in the 70's, but by the early 90's, the government stopped paying, and SETI went private.
One SETI project, called SERENDIP, collects massive amounts of data using the Arecibo Radio Telescope. To process the data quickly, and with minimal cost, the team conceived of a brilliant and exciting project.
The Birth of SETI@home
Almost everyone has a home computer now, and the combined processing power of all of those machines is quite impressive. The SETI folks realized that people would probably love to participate, and would gladly donate processor time for such a noble cause.
The Software
SETI@home is a relatively small, unobtrusive program that can be run as an application or screen saver. The SETI folks send out 300 Kb packets of data, which users download and process. Once the program has finished processing the data, it will upload the results and request the next data set. You can set the program to do this automatically if you are connected to the internet all the time. The SETI team was looking for clock cycles, and clock cycles they found; last year, the combined speed of SETI users averaged 10 teraflops, which according to SETI, is about ten times faster than the most powerful supercomputer in the world.
Oh, So Pretty!
That's what my toddler said the first time she noticed the SETI screen saver running on my computer. The screen displays a red progress bar above a very colorful 3D data analysis display. To the right of the progress bar, there are fields with information about the data being analyzed, and the user's own SETI statistics.
Is It Supposed To Take So Long?
SETI@home data sets do vary in size, but not by much. The primary factor that determines how long it will take you to complete a data set is your computer's processor type and clock speed. I read that Macs outperform Intel chips of the same speed, but then again, I read that in MacAddict. There are a number of published ways to decrease your average time, but I have only found two that make a dramatic difference:
1. Make a RAM disk. I keep the data files on the RAM disk. The computer writes to RAM much faster than it writes to the hard disk.
2. This is a Mac trick, I'm not sure if this can be done with Windows: Use a program that lets you give some applications higher priority when the computer allocates clock cycles. I use Peek-a-boo, a shareware application from Clarkwood Software.
My computer is a 233 MHz PowerBook G3, and took nearly 20 hours to complete each set, even with the tweaks I listed above. I decided it was just too slow, and gave up on SETI@home. Then, something wonderful happened. My mother decided to buy an iMac for my (then) two year old daughter. If you're thinking that a two year old has little use for a computer, you're right. She'd punch at the keys for a few minutes a day, and when she lost interest, the SETI screen saver would launch itself and run for the rest of the day. On the 400 MHz Strawberry iMac DV, the SETI units take about 11 hours. Between my daughter's iMac and my husband's Macintosh G4 (which processes a unit in about 6 hours,) we've still processed well over 1000 data sets. We usually leave the computers on all the time, and let SETI quietly work through the night. It does like a lot of RAM, so you may not want to run the application while you're actually using your computer.
Give It A Try
SETI@home is an exciting project, and I've enjoyed being a part of it. Do I think SETI will find alien signals? The odds are against them. Do I think it's a worthwhile program though? Absolutely.
Are we alone? I can't think of a more profound question.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
prfstars
|
 - Top 200 |
|
Location: The Burbs
Reviews written: 304
Trusted by: 238 members
About Me:
Hi.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.