WASHINGTON (States News Service) - The world's most powerful computer, dedicated solely to the search for extraterrestrial life, will get a major software upgrade as early as next week, when SETI@home releases version 2.0 of its distributed-computing software.
The upgrade will allow users of the program to search packets of data collected at the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico for more subtle radio signals that could possibly indicate intelligent life.
Other changes in the new version include better firewall support, so more people can use the program at work despite their companies' security measures, and a security measure for the program itself, which will prevent people from altering the report files the computer sends back to SETI@home (SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence).
The SETI@home program harnesses the power of 1.5 million idle personal computers. Members of the general public are invited to download the software, which operates like a screensaver. If the computer is connected to the internet and is idle, it will sift through some of the Arecibo data looking for signals.
The individual computers, each handling a discreet piece of data, form essentially one computer that can perform 8 teraflops, or 8 trillion calculations per second. The fastest conventional supercomputers are pressed to pull 2 or 3 teraflops.
"We're going to expand to look at new types of signals that we didn't look at before," said program director David Anderson. "The first version (of the program) was essentially looking for a signal that was on all the time.
There's a possibility that the signal might be pulsed, so it goes on and off.
"If you see the movie Contact, the signal that Elly gets is a pulsed signal Our new version would be much better at detecting it," Anderson said.
New programming language will speed up the older part of the program that looks for continuous signals, but most of the speed advantage will be eaten up by the new analysis program, resulting in an overall small drop in the speed a computer can handle a standard hunk of data.
But that doesn't bother Anderson, who is seeing 10 times the original number of participants he originally expected. SETI@home users now rip through the 35 gigabytes of data that the telescope produces every day, and have processed six months of backlogged data.
"In part we're doing [the new version] because we have more computing power than we thought we were going to and this is just a way to use that power," Anderson said. "This turns out to be the first time anyone has been able to do this kind of search because of the amount of computing power it takes.
There really isn't a single algorithm for looking for interrupted signals, you really have to take a brute force approach."
The SETI Institute, a separate though related group, looks for signals in a different manner. But Dr. Jill Tarter, director of the Institute's Phoenix project and often credited as the inspiration for Jodie Foster's character Elly in Contact said the two groups complement each other.
"We do in real time what SETI at home does with the [stored] data," Tarter said. "The search we're doing picks out those regions of the sky that we think, a priori, have a higher chance of a signal. That is, stars that are like our own. SETI@home is looking at the whole sky. When NASA had a SETI program, both these strategies were followed."
SETI@home plans on searching all of the sky that can be seen from the Arecibo telescope, by piggybacking with whoever is using the telescope at the time.
The large antenna suspended above the 1,000-foot dish swivels to focus on different parts of the sky. At the opposite end of the metal support is another antenna, used exclusively by SETI@home, that looks in the opposite direction. In two or three years, the program will have had a peek at every part of the sky the telescope can see.
Then the project hopes to get time on a new telescope, and start the search among different stars.
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