University of Chicago crunches big numbers in search for extraterrestrial intelligence with SETIAhome screen–savers

Along with a million other people worldwide, more than 170 University of Chicago students, faculty, staff and alumni use SETIAhome screen–saver software on their personal computers to help search for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. In less than two months, the group gained a top-10 ranking among universities internationally for analyzing the most SETI data.

“It would be nice if we actually did find some kind of signal of intelligent life out there, but let’s face it, the odds of that are quite long,” said Bob Bartlett, the University’s Manager of Network Security & Enterprise Network Systems Administration.

But on a more practical level, the project serves as a feasibility study for using the Internet as a giant supercomputer for research that requires vast amounts of computer power. “This methodology for making use of individual machines on the Internet really holds huge implications for future directions in computation research,” Bartlett said. “I’d like to see this methodology moved into other realms of research.”

The University already has contributed more than 62 years’ worth of computing time to SETI. As of mid-October, the Chicago group had analyzed and returned more than 30,875 data packets for SETI, or enough to fill more than 1.8 million high-density floppy disks.

The Chicago group originally consisted of just two students. Then Astrid Fingerhut, a computer account administrator at the University, became interested in installing the software on her computer. But first she asked Bartlett to check the SETIAhome software for hidden programs that would allow outside access to her files.

The program kicks in when a computer is idle and analyzes radio signals from space that are collected by the 1,000-foot diameter Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. “What they send you is raw radio information with a time and a spot in the sky,” Bartlett said. What they get back is information about the characteristics of the signals that might indicate they are artificial.

After Barlett checked the program, which is provided by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, he continued to run it on his own computer. Then he learned that large and small companies, elementary and high schools, government agencies and universities had formed groups to compete to see whose computers could analyze the most data.

At the time, late June, the Chicago group consisted of two people. Bartlett joined the group and advertised the availability of SETIAhome within his own department and on an internal University e-mail list.

He also gave the group a quick boost by installing SETIAhome on a couple of idle computers he was getting ready to install as campus servers. “They’re very powerful, and they were just sitting there at the time because we were building the infrastructure around them,” he said. When those computers were no longer available for SETIAhome, other University laboratories began lending their computer muscle to the cause.

The number of Chicago participants and data analyzed by Chicago team members rose dramatically. By the end of July, the Chicago group had broken into the top 100. By late August, the group had made it to number 10, having surpassed such institutions as Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology. Now the Chicago group ranks ninth.

The top seven universities are: Michigan Technological University; Indiana University; University of Wisconsin, Madison; Georgia Institute of Technology; University of California–Berkeley; Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden; and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Ninth is the Helsinki University of Technology and tenth is the Norwegian University of Technology and Science.

Bartlett said the rankings are more fun than meaningful, but it might help create an awareness of the University’s substantial computing infrastructure. “We’re not really considered a wired university,” Bartlett said. “This is just not the way we are perceived, and we actually do have quite a computing infrastructure.”

Bartlett attributes the popularity of SETIAhome to human curiosity about the question: are we alone in the universe?

Fingerhut said new students who visit her office to open a computer account often comment on the SETIAhome screen–saver running on her computer.

“Everybody recognizes it or at least is interested in it when you tell them what it is,” she said.

The Chicago group also brings together––virtually, anyway––people whose interests at the University might otherwise fail to overlap. “It’s just fun to share with them and feel like you’re moving toward a goal,” Bartlett said.

The SETIAhome screen–saver software and related information is available at http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/.