Distributed Processing of SETI Data

Abstract

As you have read in prior chapters, researchers have been performing progressively more sensitive SETI searches since 1960. Each search has been limited by the technologies available at the time. As radio frequency technologies have become more efficient and computers have become faster, the searches have increased in capacity and become more sensitive. Often the limits of the hardware that performs the calculations required to process the telescope data in order to expose any embedded signals is what limits the sensitivity of the search. Shortly before the start of the 21st century, projects began to appear that exploited the processing capabilities of computers connected to the Internet in order to solve problems that required a large amount of computing power. The SETI@home project, managed by myself and a group of researchers at the Space Sciences Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, was the first attempt to use large-scale distributed computing to solve the problems of performing a sensitive search for narrow band radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. (Korpela et al., 2001) A follow-on project, Astropulse, searches for extraterrestrial signals with wider bandwidths and shorter time durations. Both projects are ongoing at the present time (mid-2010).