Seti@Home

SUNY OSWEGO
"BOINC" TEAM

Joining the Seti@Home Project.

SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a scientific area whose goal is to detect intelligent life outside Earth. One approach, known as radio SETI, uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. Such signals are not known to occur naturally, so a detection would provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology. Radio telescope signals consist primarily of noise (from celestial sources and the receiver's electronics) and man-made signals such as TV stations, radar, and satellites. Modern radio SETI projects analyze the data digitally. More computing power enables searches to cover greater frequency ranges with more sensitivity. Radio SETI, therefore, has an insatiable appetite for computing power. Seti@Home was the original large scale distributed computer project, is the starting point for BOINC, and remains the largest project associated with BOINC.

Step by Step Instructions for Joining and Running Seti@Home

  1. If the computer you want to run Seti@Home on belongs to you, you can skip to step 3.
  2. Not everyone wants to run BOINC or Seti@Home on their machines. This is particularly true for companies and other organizations who feel obligated to enforce "business use only" rules for computer use. Make sure its OK to run BOINC on the machine you want to install it on before you actually install and run it. Its OK if BOINC doesn't run everywhere.
  3. Read the rules and policies of Seti@Home.
  4. If you already run a BOINC client on your machine for another project, skip to step 8.
  5. Download BOINC for your computer from the BOINC site. There are versions that run under Windows, on MacIntosh, on Linux, and on other platforms. Download behavior will probably vary somewhat depending on your browser, so you're more or less on your own to know what to do here.
  6. There shouldn't be a problem if you've downloaded from one of the sites pointed to in step 5 and most virus software will check the download as it happens anyway, but if you are concerned about downloading a virus or other malicious program, now is a good time to check. It is generally presumed that you have anti-virus software installed already, but if you don't, SUNY Oswego students, staff, and faculty can download McAfee antivirus from the Oswego web site.
  7. Install BOINC. The details of how you do this will depend on your system and your browser, so your kind of on your own here, but the usual process involves finding the downloaded program (which will often be on your computers desktop), double clicking on the program to run it, and answering any questions it asks. The last step of the installation will probably start BOINC.
  8. Run BOINC. If BOINC is already running on your system, proceed to Step 9. You can usually tell if its running on Windows systems because a small "B" icon (for Boinc) will show up on the application bar at the bottom right side of the screen. On MacIntosh, the same icon will usually appear near the top right corner of the screen.
  9. Join Seti@Home by going to the the SUNY Oswego team page on Seti@Home and selecting the team entry that at "Create team account URL." Here's a shortcut to that page. You'll need to fill in an online form with your name, e-mail address, a password, country affiliation, and zip code. Pick a user id and password that is easy to remember or save the information somewhere. You may to print out the next page or save it somewhere. You will receive a confirmation e-mail at the e-mail address you provide. Print and/or save this e-mail. You may, in particular, have a need for the key it provides.
  10. Add Seti@Home to your running BOINC client. To do this, select "Projects" from on the menu bar, then select "Attach to Project" from the drop down. You'll first be asked for a project URL. Enter "http://setiathome.berkeley.edu". You'll then be prompted for either your Seti@Home userid and password or your account key. Once you enter this informatoin your BOINC client should immediately contact Seti@Home, download a work unit, and start working on it. It may be that, for one reason or another, Seti@Home can't give you a work unit immediately. If it can't, BOINC will keep trying automatically until it gets a work unit. So long as it is trying, you've joined "Seti@Home".

If you get to here, you should be running Seti@Home under BOINC.

Note that you can run more than one project on your computer. This can be a good idea. BOINC projects occasionally stop sending out work units for short periods of time (sometimes as long as a day or two). If you are running another project your machine probably won't be idle while it waits for its next unit of work.