Future directions of SETI@home

Future directions of SETI@home

The current SETI@home search will wind down over the next year or so. However, we are working on new projects that will continue to use the computer power of millions of volunteers to further SETI and other scientific research. Our plans include the following:

BOINC - Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing
SETI@home southern hemisphere search
AstroPulse - astronomical pulse detection

Here's our timeline for the completion of our current project and the release of new ones:

Project Timeline last updated December 2, 2002

Sep 03
Oct 03
Nov 03
Dec 03
Jan 04
Mar 04

Arecibo data recorder:

SETI@home data server:

SETI@home client for BOINC:

Analysis of Arecibo results:

Southern hemisphere data recorder:

Southern hemisphere client

AstroPulse (on BOINC):

NOTE: This timeline is only an estimate and is subject to change.

BOINC - distributed computing technology for SETI and beyond back to top

SETI@home consists of many interconnected programs - screensaver, data server, web-page scripts, and so on. This software has served remarkably well, but over time major limitations and flaws in its design have emerged.

To support future projects we are developing the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). Like the original SETI@home, BOINC consists of a client program and a data-distribution server backed by a database. BOINC, however, is not a specific application program - it's a framework that can support many different applications. This will make it easy for us to run multiple computations simultaneously - like AstroPulse and our southern hemisphere search - and to release new versions of these applications without requiring you to manually download and install software.

Even more significantly, BOINC is an open system. Other science projects can create their own distributed computations using BOINC. You choose the projects in which to participate, and you decide how much of your computing resources should go to each project. Your PC might search for ET, study global climate change, and do biological research, all at the same time.

There are many advantages to sharing resources in this way. For example, suppose SETI@home's radio telescope is shut down for repairs and we temporarily run out of data to analyze. With BOINC, your CPU power would be diverted to other projects, under your selection and control.

Compared to the SETI@home software, BOINC will have many new features:

Configurable work caching: the client can download multiple work units at once.
OpenGL graphics: we're looking forward to redoing the SETI@home graphics in true 3D.
Expanded preferences: you have complete control over how much of your resources (CPU time, disk space, network bandwidth) are used. These preferences are edited through a web interface, making it easy to manage multiple computers.
Project-specific preferences: this will make it possible, for example, to give you a choice of color schemes in your SETI@home graphics.
Client storage: Projects will be able to use client disk storage as well as CPU time (subject to user-specific limits). This will allow SETI@home, for example, to archive radio data on user disks instead of using digital tapes.
Unified accounting: BOINC will have a cheat-resistant accounting system that reflects actual computation done (not just a count of workunits, which may vary widely in size).
Open source: BOINC is open source (though applications need not be). If you want to customize your client, or fix a bug in it, now you can. The server-side parts of BOINC use other open-source software like Apache, PHP, and MySQL.

BOINC is currently in development and is being tested in our lab. We hope to use it for a public project (most likely Astropulse) late in 2002.

Southern Hemisphere Search - increasing SETI@home's sky coverage back to top

The Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico receives information from about one third of the sky, all in the northern celestial hemisphere. But what if ET is lurking in the southern skies? The Parkes telescope in Australia is the largest radio telescope in the southern hemisphere and can observe all of the southern sky. Fortunately, SETI colleagues in Australia have agreed to colloborate with SETI@home and host a new data recorder at Parkes.

Work on this new SETI@home data recorder is well under way. The new instrument will record data from 13 places on the sky simultaneously, observing 13 "beams" at a time compared to the 1 "beam" at Arecibo.

We are trying to raise funds to conduct these southern hemisphere observations for SETI@home. Funding permitting, we expect the new data recorder to be installed and operational at Parkes in early 2003. For more information on the Southern Hemisphere SETI@home plans, see "SETI@home Gearing to Expand the Search" at the Planetary Society. The Planetary Society

AstroPulse - the search for pulsars, ET, and black holes back to top

One of the first applications to make use of the new BOINC distributed computing framework is a project we call AstroPulse. This project will re-examine the existing SETI@home data tapes for a new type of signal radio pulses that only last for a microsecond.

This type of signal is different from those which would be caught by SETI@home. Since the pulses are so fast, they are broad-band signals. We need the full 2.5 MHz bandwidth for maximum sensitivity, whereas SETI@home breaks up this frequency band into 256 10 kHz sub-bands. Also, pulses travelling through the interstellar medium (the thin gas which fills the space between stars in our galaxy) become "dispersed," or stretched out in time. We can correct for this effect with a specialized algorithm (known as "coherent de-dispersion"), but it is very computation intensive, which is why this is a good distributed computing project.

There are several possible sources for this type of signal. One possible source which is already known is called a pulsar. This is a rapidly spinning neutron star which "beams" radiation at us every time it rotates. Our search may uncover new pulsars, since no one has looked for pulses this fast before. Another possibility is extraterrestrial civilizations - a series of pulses could be an easily recognized signal, and a pulse with negative dispersion would stand out as obviously artificial (natural dispersion always causes faster frequencies to arrive first). A third possibility is an evaporating black hole. It has been theorized that a black hole which completely evaporates will give out a short radio pulse at the end of its life, but no one has seen this happen yet. Our search will be at least 100 times more sensitive than previous efforts.

We are well on our way to an in-lab test of the AstroPulse/BOINC system. A beta version will be done by the end of 2002, and public release should follow early in 2003.