Page "Search for extraterrestrial intelligence" Paragraph 28

SETI @ home was conceived by David Gedye along with Craig Kasnoff and is a popular volunteer distributed computing project that was launched by the University of California, Berkeley in May 1999.

It was originally funded by The Planetary Society and Paramount Pictures, and later by the state of California.

The project is run by director David P. Anderson and chief scientist Dan Werthimer.

Any individual can become involved with SETI research by downloading the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing ( BOINC ) software program, attaching to the SETI @ home project, and allowing the program to run as a background process that uses idle computer power.

The SETI @ home program itself runs signal analysis on a " work unit " of data recorded from the central 2. 5 MHz wide band of the SERENDIP IV instrument.

After computation on the work unit is complete, the results are then automatically reported back to SETI @ home servers at UC Berkeley.

As of June 28, 2009 the SETI @ home project has over 180, 000 active participants volunteering a total of over 290, 000 computers.

These computers give SETI @ home an average computational power of 617 teraFLOPS.

Radio source SHGb02 + 14a is the most interesting signal analyzed to date.