SETI@home ("SETI at home") is a distributed computing project using Internet-connected computers, hosted by the
Space Sciences Laboratory, at the Univeristy of California, Berkley 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.
