What is Folding and how may I help SETI

[darkside1016]

I have a concept of what folding is ( obviously ) but would like more detail on what you do, how to do it, and how I could help out the SETI team ( I've always loved the stars and such since I was a little tod, always able to spot out the constellations ).

Any info is appriciated and I would look forward to helping out with my wasted cpu cycles ( Also a good burn-in I hear ).

RIG is in my SIG, and its all brand-new and un-burnt, so OC'ing and such will come a little slow, but I have alot of potential.

[zexmarquies01]

Damn dude, nice rig! i wish i had the money for that!

Well, looks like you already got the idea of what folding is....

So here's an explanation about SETI.

First off, i won't get too much into boinc, but a little bit of explanation is needed.

Boinc is a Central program that can connect with different projects that you can work on with your computer.

Thats about the basics of BOINC itself. heh.

Now with seti.

First, We have Satelite dishes around the country and in various places. What these dishes do is they are then pointed into the sky and they collect any " noise " we hear from space.

Space does have noise in it. Like from Pulsars, Black holes, Neutron stars, White Dwarf stars...etc. They all release a form of radar, and noise.

These satelites pick up that noise.

Well then the noise is then put into computer databases. Where its then split up into peices we call Work Units. The workunits are then sent out all over the world to people who have boinc installed on their computers.

your computer then scans through the Work unit, seeing if it can find a signal, or noise that artificially made. That is, made from other living beings, and not just random garbage thrown out from the rest of space.

Then it sends in the Work Unit back to berkley and they check it, to make sure that you correctly "crunched" the Work unit. they do this to get rid of errors that can be caused from Faulty ram, a Bad CPU, or an instable system thats overclocked to much.

once they look at it, they decide if there's anything interesting it in. If not, then they just keep looking.

if they find anything interesting, they check out that part of the sky again, and keep re-sending out that same Work unit to many people to make sure the data is correct.

The reason we need people crunching is that there is SOOO much information, and it takes some time to "crunch" the work units, that Berkley ( the founders ) NEEDS us. They don't have nearly the computing power to do this on their own. If they tried, it would take them THOUSANDS of years to have gotten done what they collected in the first year alone.

Thats pretty much the basis for Seti. Just a way to try to find out if we are alone in the universe or not.

If you ask most of us here crunching for boinc, at least 95% of us here on the forums will tell you we think there are others out there. Simply because if we believed we were the only ones, we wouldn't be here running seti.

Its an ongoing project that has been around for years. And it will continue to go untill either berkley runs out of money to do this, or we can the entire sky....

Its a fun way to help search for ET, Join teams and have competitions. Once you get into seti, you become...addicted. You want more power. You want more Comptuers, you will want to start to overclock. Just so you can get Work Units done faster and faster. it becomes VERY addicting. :D

Well, if you have any questions, just ask. All of us here will gladly answer anything if needed be.

ps. Currently we are 8th in the world in terms of Credits we have received from running SETI. we can use all the help we can get to move up a few mor places, so if you do join seti, remember....Crunch for team 32! ;)