A3veen.nl

Two papers on SETI@home (“SETI at home”) are published in The Astronomical Journal:

• SETI@home: Data Acquisition and Front-End Processing describes SETI@home’s data recorder, splitter, and client program. It covers the five detection types, their parameters and statistics, and the algorithm for finding them.
• SETI@home: Data Analysis and Findings describes the back end (Nebula) and its results: RFI removal, candidate finding and ranking. It explains how artificial signals, or ‘birdies’, were used to optimize algorithms and estimate overall sensitivity.

SETI@home (“SETI at home”) is a project of the Berkeley SETI Research Center to analyze radio signals with the aim of searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Until March 2020, it was run as an Internet-based public volunteer computing project that employed the BOINC software platform. It is hosted by the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, and is one of many activities undertaken as part of the worldwide SETI effort. SETI@home software was released to the public on May 17, 1999, making it the third large-scale use of volunteer computing over the Internet for research purposes, after Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) was launched in 1996 and distributed.net in 1997. Along with MilkyWay@home and Einstein@home, it has the investigation of phenomena in interstellar space as its primary purpose. In March 2020, the project stopped sending out new work to SETI@home users, bringing the crowdsourced computing aspect of the project to a stop. At the time, the team intended to shift focus onto the analysis and interpretation of the 20 years’ worth of accumulated data. However, the team left open the possibility of eventually resuming volunteer computing using data from other radio telescopes, such as MeerKAT and FAST. As of November 2021, the science team has analysed the data and removed noisy signals (Radio Frequency Interference) using the Nebula tool they developed and will choose the top-scoring 100 or so multiplets to be observed using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, to which they have been granted 24 hours of observation time. On March 31, 2020, UC Berkeley stopped sending out new data for SETI@Home clients to process, ending the effort for the time being. The program stated they were at a point of “diminishing returns” with the volunteer processing and needed to put the effort into hibernation while they processed the results. Until 2020, SETI@home procured its data from the Arecibo Observatory facility that was operated by the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center and administered by SRI International. The decreasing operating budget for the observatory has created a shortfall of funds which has not been made up from other sources such as private donors, NASA, other foreign research institutions, nor private non-profit organizations such as SETI@home. However, in the overall long-term views held by many involved with the SETI project, any usable radio telescope could take over from Arecibo (which completely collapsed in December 2020), as all the SETI systems are portable and relocatable.