Inspired by the recent rumblings of a possible signal find, I downloaded SETI@Home again after a long break from it (I know the claim was later shot down, but still..). Is there a GAF group, or was there ever one?
On the whole very little. A single SETI@Home workunit is currently a bit under 400K, and depending on your computer should last some number of hours. Anything at all recent and it will be well under 10. You can find programs like SETIGate which can cache as many workunits as you want at one time, though.
However, they're also working on a complete remake of the basic program, which can cache multiple units on its own. It's called BOINC, and is made to also support other shared processing efforts. However, since I started trying it out about a month ago they've had all sorts of server difficulties with this new one, so just stick with the old program for a while; they're doing the same work.
cheers, so it's not constantly streaming data back and forwards? it just downloads a file and works on it? what would an average months data transfer be like?
No seriously how does it work? It gets the infomation, analyzes it, and compares it to data generated from the same information other users are processing?
cheers, so it's not constantly streaming data back and forwards? it just downloads a file and works on it? what would an average months data transfer be like?
say on my computer (p4 2.4 ghz), i nail about 1 work unit every 3 hours, imagine that as 400 k up and down. (most likely nowhere near that on the upstream)
so if you hit 8 a day that would be 3.2 megs roughly 100 megs down and probably alot less up a month.
so if you're running a p4 1.4 or something you should hit about 25 megs of bandwidth a month (2 work units a day)
No seriously how does it work? It gets the infomation, analyzes it, and compares it to data generated from the same information other users are processing?
As far as my layman's understanding having not read an explanation in a long time... they presume that extra-terrestrials would communicate using a certain type of radio signal that works well for transmitting long distances without much distortion. Our computers analyze the many such signals radio telescopes receive, and weed out the ones that act as we'd expect naturally occuring signals to.
i recommend you guys use SETI@Home's commandline version if you want to get more workunits done. I was originally doing about 7-10 hours a workunit on the gui version... commandline put that down to about 2 hours 45 minutes