SETI@home ("SETI at home") is a distributed computing project using Internet-connected computers, 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. SETI@home was released to the public on May 17,
1999.
The Project (developed by Berkley University) allows deep space radio frequencies to be analyzed by common personal computers
through a screen saver. The screen saver program, which runs while you are not busy on your computer, will look for possible
Alien signals from the data that was collected and sent to your computer.
With over 5.2 million participants worldwide, the project is the distributed computing project with the most participants
to date. Since its launch on May 17, 1999, the project has logged over two million years of aggregate computing time. On September
26, 2001, SETI@home had performed a total of 1021 floating point operations.
It is acknowledged by the Guinness World Records as the largest computation in history (Newport 2005). With over
1.36 million computers in the system, as of March 12, 2007, SETI@home has the ability to compute over 265 TeraFLOPS. For comparison,
Blue Gene (currently the world's fastest supercomputer) peaks at just over 360 TFLOPS with sustained rate of 280 TFLOPS.
The TAPS Family Groups, over 80 in all, with forty-one (41) TAPS Family Group Members actively participating in the SETI@Home
project, focusing their efforts on aiding in the search for extraterrestrial life with more TAPS Family Groups joining every
day, the TAPS Family hopes we can help SETI achieve their goal of finding out just who is next door.
