SETI@home David P. Anderson Space Sciences Lab UC Berkeley LASER 10 Feb 2016
Where’s the computing power? Consumer desktop/laptop video game consoles smartphones, tablets appliances Organizational supercomputers clusters grids clouds << ~1,000 ExaFLOPs
Volunteer computing SETI@home Other early projects launched in 1999 at UCB Spaces Science Lab continuous operation and expansion Other early projects Folding@home (Stanford) Mersenne prime search
SETI Is there life outside Earth? If so, is it intelligent? If so, what’s in its “encyclopedia”? art/music/dance/literature science/math/philosophy social/governmental/economic
Approaches to SETI Radio SETI Optical SETI Planet spectroscopy Look for physical probes in our solar system Look for unusual star occlusions
SETI is a field, not an organization ~20 separate SETI projects at various institutions Berkeley SETI Research Center (BSRC) doing several projects, mostly radio Telescopes: Arecibo, FAST (China), Green Bank, Square Kilometer Array
Radio SETI Transparency Radio telescopes/transmitters: single-pixel leakage, beacons Fourier Transform
Challenges with radio SETI What to look for? Signal types narrow-band pulsed spread-spectrum Frequency range? Targeted vs. sky survey Background noise Man-made interference (RFI) Signal drift due to acceleration
SETI@home Data: Arecibo sky survey, hydrogen line Front end (volunteer computing): find candidate signals many chirp rates, FFT lengths, signal types Back end archive signals in a DB identify/remove RFI score “sky pixels”
What then? Human-powered systems for examining meta- candidates (most will be RFI) Re-observation Try machine learning to identify RFI and unusual sets of signals Maybe find ET, or at least new natural phenomena
BOINC The middleware used by SETI@home Open-source, NSF-funded from 2002 to 2015 Server: distributes jobs Client: runs jobs on consumer devices BOINC deals with diversity of computing devices recovery from random and malicious faults volunteer web features
Advances in BOINC Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) Apps that run in virtual machines Android smartphones
Volunteer computing today 500,000 active computers 50 projects 10 PetaFLOPS
Projects using BOINC Climateprediction.net Rosetta@home Einstein@home IBM World Community Grid CERN
Future: Science@home Integrate BOINC with mainstream high- performance computing, e.g. supercomputer centers Volunteers choose research areas rather than projects
Contact info SETI@home http://setiathome.berkeley.edu Berkeley SETI Research Center https://seti.berkeley.edu BOINC http://boinc.berkeley.edu Me davea@ssl.berkeley.edu