1. SETI@home David P. Anderson Space Sciences Lab UC Berkeley LASER
10 Feb 2016

2. Where’s the computing power?
Consumer
desktop/laptop
video game consoles
smartphones, tablets
appliances
Organizational
supercomputers
clusters
grids
clouds
<<
~1,000 ExaFLOPs

3. Volunteer computing SETI@home Other early projects
launched in 1999 at UCB Spaces Science Lab
continuous operation and expansion
Other early projects
(Stanford)
Mersenne prime search

4. 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

5. Approaches to SETI Radio SETI Optical SETI Planet spectroscopy
Look for physical probes in our solar system
Look for unusual star occlusions

6. 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

7. Radio SETI Transparency Radio telescopes/transmitters: single-pixel
leakage, beacons
Fourier Transform

8. 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

9. 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”

10. 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

11. 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

12. Advances in BOINC Graphics Processing Units (GPUs)
Apps that run in virtual machines
Android smartphones

13. Volunteer computing today
500,000 active computers
50 projects
10 PetaFLOPS

14. Projects using BOINC Climateprediction.net Rosetta@home Einstein@home
IBM World Community Grid
CERN

15. Future:
Integrate BOINC with mainstream high- performance computing, e.g. supercomputer centers
Volunteers choose research areas rather than projects

16. Contact info
Berkeley SETI Research Center
BOINC Me