[LI] SETI @Home

[Raj Mathur <raju@xxxxxxx>]

Hi,

OK, another chain letter, but hopefully not in the spirit of ``Votes
for Gandhi'' et al.  This is a global effort, and I feel that most
Linux users would be interested in the SETI.  If you're not, feel free 
to flame!

SETI is the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.  They have
hundreds of radio telescopes dividing the sky into pieces and scanning 
it for radio signals which have originated from an intelligent race
somewhere in the Galaxy.  It is believed that an intelligent race
would definitely put out some indicator of its existence, and radio is 
believed to be the best medium for doing this.

Now, it requires petaflops of computer power to be able to
differentiate between real signals and the random noise which is
coming in from all over the place.  So the SETI team started the
SETI@Home project, which is basically a distributed processing
facility for checking SETI data for valid signals.  If you run Winduhs 
(and maybe Mac) you can get a SETI screensaver which (I presume) shows 
you SETI-related pictures while processing SETI data and uploading the 
results to the SETI team.  For Linux and other Unixen you download a
text-based pre-compiled program which you can run in the background.
This program will periodically contact the SETI@Home site, download
some more raw SETI data, process it and upload the results back to
SETI.

I've been running this since yesterday on my notebook.  In about 4
hours of running time I've managed to process ~25% of the block of
data allocated to me.  Sorry, no exciting peaks found yet!  I guess
I'll be ready to upload and get a new block in a couple of days.  In
the meantime, the SETI program boots up when my computer does, and
continues it's work at very low priority, so my foreground tasks don't 
suffer.  Also, I don't need to be on the 'Net all the time -- only at
download and upload times.  The rest of the time I can process SETI
data offline.

More information about the SETI@Home project, as well as the program
for Linux are at:

	http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

If anyone wants my bootup script for RH Linux, it's at:

	http://reality.sgi.com/raju/seti

If you want SETI@Home to start up whenever you boot your computer,
download this script, then:

	cp seti /etc/rc.d/init.d/
	chmod 755 /etc/rc.d/init.d/seti
	chkconfig seti on
	/etc/rc.d/init.d/seti start

It expects to find the SETI@Home programs and files in:

	/usr/local/setiathome-1.3.i386-pc-linux-gnu-gnulibc2.1/

and dumps its output in a file called SETIOUT in the same directory.

Let me know if you have any trouble getting this to run...

Regards,

-- Raju
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