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happygeek 2,411 Most Valuable Poster

If you ever wondered just what it takes to look for aliens, then prepare to get informed. Sure, you might imagine it doesn't take much more than hooking up a load of computers to form a gigantic zombie network which, for a change, does not use spare CPU cycles to send spam. Indeed, the SETI@home project has been doing this for years by listening to space and scanning what it hears for signs of alien life.

This past year, the SETI@home team has been working hard on the Astropulse application which searches the collected data for high power pulses. Many belive that this methodology could well be a much more efficient technique for your average extraterrestrial to transmit signals. The downside of Astropulse, however, is that it consumes significantly more CPU cycles in order to do what it does. Which means that SETI is looking for more volunteers to donate their spare computer resources to the networked search. Volunteer efforts are better used by applying the new and improved Near Time Persistency Checker (NTPCKR) to sift through potential signals returned and prioritise those which are most likely to be of an extraterrestrial origin.

So what is the true cost of searching for alien life then? Well, according to SETI@home it is USD $548,200 more than they have available. That is the amount the project says it needs in order to continue the effort during 2009. "With more funds we hope to hire an additional person to maintain the servers and web site" says Dan Werthimer, SETI@home Chief Scientist at the Space Science Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley who added "This would free our existing researchers to work more on the science of SETI@home and increase our chances of finding an extraterrestrial signal, and less on keeping our servers operational."

I wish them luck, of course, but in times of economic crisis when the credit crunch is causing us all to tighten our budgetary belts just to maintain some semblance of normality in our lives, the likelihood of finding a bit extra to give to someone to go look for aliens is, well, the stuff of science fiction.

Still, it could be a better investment than sending or even for that matter.

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Good thread starter, — the headline “cost” hides two separate problems: the raw CPU needed to do deeper analyses, and the recurring operational costs that volunteer crunching alone doesn’t remove. Money pays for running and backing up huge result databases, high‑I/O servers, bandwidth for large workunits, staff time to validate/score candidates and to arrange telescope follow‑ups, and the RFI/candidate‑scoring pipelines that keep the science credible. (sciencedirect.com)

Why Astropulse in particular is so expensive: it searches for extremely short (microsecond) wideband pulses using coherent dedispersion, which preserves microsecond structure but forces the code to test many thousands of dispersion trials (the literature cites figures on the order of tens of thousands), so each workunit is larger and each search needs many more FFTs/convolutions than a conventional narrowband search. That’s why volunteer cycles are essential, and why the team had to design special pipelines to handle the volume. (science.gov)

On the back end, automatic scorers and interference‑rejection systems add continuous load: results must be validated, cross‑matched for repeatability, filtered for terrestrial RFI, re‑scored and queued for follow‑up — all of which require fast I/O, memory, and human oversight. Volunteer CPUs lower one part of the bill, but not the ongoing systems‑administration and telescope time costs. (science.gov)

Practical takeaway for readers who want impact today: join the BOINC community and attach to projects (BOINC is the delivery layer for these apps); prefer GPU builds when offered; run a low‑power, always‑on cruncher if possible; and support project infrastructure or development (not just raw cycles) via donations or volunteering on forums. For start‑up steps and client setup see BOINC getting‑started guides. ()

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