Oct 6 2008

Linux, Seti@Home, And The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Posted by kj in Living, Technology, how to | Print This Article
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I remember reading Octavia Butler’s book, Parable Of The Sower and particularly the quote:

“The destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars…beyond Mars. Other star systems. Living worlds.”

This passage in the book really resonated with me and took me back to the 3rd grade when I had an assignment to watch and document the phases of the moon everyday for a month. Ever since that assignment, I’ve been endlessly seduced by the sky and that which lies beyond it.

I was never too good at using a telescope, but that’s done nothing to hinder my endless fascination with the stars. I can’t help but to wonder what’s really out there. It’s strange to think that a lucky few (astronauts and civilians alike) have gotten to leave our atmosphere and gaze at space and the stars from such a different vantage point. Who knows, with commercialization of space travel on the rise, maybe I’ll get there one day. But until then I’ll contribute by giving my free cpu cycles to Seti@Home.

Seti@Home is a project aimed at finding signs of extraterrestrial intelligence using the collective processing power of computers around the world to analyze massive amounts of data gathered from radio telescopes. I first participated in the Seti@Home effort back in 2000 during my sophmore year in college. Back then I was still using windows as my primary operating system and didn’t know of any other Seti@Home client available at the time. Fast forward a few years and the Seti@Home project is still going strong and clients are available for a range of operating systems including linux.

Installing and Configuring Seti@Home

Seti@Home now uses the BOINC open source client application that is tailored to projects requiring volunteer and grid computing resources. Using the Boinc client you can not only connect to Seti@Home, but also other space related efforts such as Einstein@home and Milkyway@home. There are also a host of medical and mathematical projects too.

Download the Boinc client software from the Berkley Boinc Project.

Once downloaded, I created a directory called gridComputing and copied the the downloaded file to this directory. Then I ran the shell script at the terminal prompt using the following command: sh ./boinc_6.2.15_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu.sh
Running the script resulted in the extraction of the Boinc client files. Among these files is once named run_manager. If you double click on this file, you should be presented with the following dialog box. I just choose “run”.
Next you’ll be presented with a screen instructing you to attach to a project. Click Next.
On the “Choose a project” screen you can choose from a host of projects to join or enter the project url if you want to join a project not listed in the selection box. I chose SETI@home. Click Next.
If you are new to Seti@home or whatever project you are joining, you’ll have to create an account before attaching to the project. Click Next.
That’s it for setting up Seti@Home and the Boinc client. After you have logged in with your account information, you’ll be presented with the following screen.
If you want to specify parameters such as when to run seti, how much hard drive space to use, and how long it can run, click Advanced View and these changes can be specified.