SETI@home ("SETI at home") is an Internet-based public volunteer computing project employing the BOINC software platform, hosted by the Space Sciences Laboratory, at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States. SETI is an acronym for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Its purpose is to analyze radio signals, searching for signs of extra terrestrial intelligence, and is one of many activities undertaken as part of SETI.
SETI@home was released to the public on May 17, 1999,[5][6][7] making it the second large-scale use of distributed computing over the Internet for research purposes, as Distributed.net was launched in 1997. Along with MilkyWay@home and Einstein@home, it is the third major computing project of this type that has the investigation of phenomena in interstellar space as its primary purpose

it has proved to the scientific community that distributed computing projects using Internet-connected computers can succeed as a viable analysis tool

It is acknowledged by the Guinness World Records as the largest computation in history.[18] With over 145,000 active computers in the system (1.4 million total) in 233 countries, as of 23 June 2013 (2013-06-23)[update], SETI@home had the ability to compute over 668 teraFLOPS.[19] For comparison, the Tianhe-2 computer, which as of 23 June 2013 (2013-06-23)[update] was the world's fastest supercomputer, was able to compute 33.86 petaFLOPS

Project future[edit]

There were future plans to get data from the Parkes Observatory in Australia to analyse the southern hemisphere.[20] However, as of 9 March 2009 (2009-03-09)[update], these plans were not mentioned in the project's website. Other plans include a Multi-Beam Data Recorder, a Near Time Persistency Checker and Astropulse (an application that uses coherent dedispersion to search for pulsed signals).[21] Astropulse will team with the original Seti@Home to detect other sources, such as rapidly rotating pulsars, exploding primordial black holes, or as-yet unknown astrophysical phenomena.[22] Beta testing of the final public release version of Astropulse was completed in July 2008 and the distribution of work units to higher spec machines capable of processing the more CPU intensive work units started in mid July 2008


Global warming effect[edit]

Critics of SETI@home believe that, by relying on widely distributed machines that are often less electrically efficient older machines including many desktop computers, theorize that it may contribute to global warming, the theory that man-made activity is creating gases, called greenhouse gases, such as CO2, that cause the Earth to warm unnaturally, and distributive computing projects like SETI@home contribute to the increase of these gases. Critics also claim that distributive computing projects, like SETI@home, are equivalent to data centers. One critic, the environmental activist group Greenpeace, who believe emissions of greenhouse gases by computing environments, such as data centers and cloud computing, increase greenhouse gases and therefore global warming, have launched political campaigns [25] against Apple, Amazon.com, Microsoft and HP in 2012[26]). However, this assertion that distributive computing projects like SETI@home are equivalent to data centers may not bear up under scrutiny because distributive computing projects like SETI@home were created specifically to be different than data centers as indicated by their respective names. A data center is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems in a centralized location, hence datacenter, where distributive computing, the distribution of processing tasks to multiple remote personal computer class (versus server class) computers, is decentralized by it's very nature. Also, data centers typically require and use greater resources due to the stress on performance versus the desire to be economical with the use of server class computers. Data centers require large sources of power due to highly intense computing, which distributive computing environments, which rely usually on normal residential power supply, do not require and data centers require significant cooling implementations which distributive computing does not require

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home