“We were planning on running our servers from a small desktop machine,” Korpela says. But Korpela says that within a month or two, had attracted a couple million active users, which overwhelmed the modest equipment underpinning the project, causing frequent crashes. In 1999, the public portion of the internet was new enough that going viral was a nearly unknown phenomenon. The day we turned it on, we had close to half a million people show up.” “It was just the sheer number of people that were interested in When we started we planned or thought that maybe we could get 10,000 people to be interested in doing this. “The biggest issue was not the people on dial-up connections,” Korpela recalls. But its creators weren’t prepared for the outpouring of public interest that propagated through word of mouth and posts on forums and sites such as Slashdot. By the spring of ’99, was ready to launch, despite the difficulty of making it compatible with all kinds of computers and dealing with pre-broadband internet.
#SETIATHOME BOINC SOFTWARE#
SERENDIP supplied the incipient with data from the venerable Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which until 2016 featured the world’s largest single-aperture radio telescope.įueled by $50,000 from the Planetary Society and $10,000 from a company backed by Microsoft cofounder and SETI enthusiast Paul Allen, Korpela and Anderson started designing software that would split that data into chunks that could be distributed to personal computers, processed, and sent back to Berkeley for further analysis. Werthimer was a SETI veteran who had been hunting for alien life since the 1970s and oversaw the SERENDIP program, which piggybacks on observations that radio astronomers are already conducting and scours the results for evidence that E.T. He and Anderson joined forces with multiple partners in the astronomy and SETI fields, including Eric Korpela, the current director of and Dan Werthimer, the Berkeley SETI Research Center’s chief scientist. Gedye thought using computers to comb through data recorded by radio telescopes in search of signals sent by intelligent extraterrestrial life would both appeal to the public and demonstrate the potential for public participation to boost the scientific community’s processing power.
“That was the point where a lot of home computers were on the internet,” says Berkeley research scientist David Anderson, Gedye’s grad advisor and the cofounder of “Also the point where personal computers were becoming fast enough that they could potentially do number-crunching for scientific purposes.”
and other distributed-computing projects have filled that need nicely, allowing me to contribute to science on a scale that would have been unimaginable just a few decades was the brainchild of a UC Berkeley grad student named David Gedye, who came up with the concept of using personal computers for scientific purposes in 1995. “I could have probably gone with student loans and a few years of eating ramen, but I wasn’t in the right frame of mind anymore,” he says. aspired to be a scientist as soon as he could read, but financial difficulties forced him to drop out of university, which put an end to that dream. It also signaled the advent of a productive and unprecedented citizen-science project that continues today, 20 years after it launched in May 1999.
Eleanor Arroway discovering a message sent across the universe, but it would make a major impact on the next two decades of his life. The moment he heard about the program that would eventually come to be called wasn’t as dramatic as Jodie Foster’s portrayal of Dr. The scientists were interested in SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and courtesy of Contact, so was Kevin D.
#SETIATHOME BOINC MOVIE#
Around the time the movie Contact came out in 1997, Kevin D., a governmental IT support and procurement employee in Toronto, saw a notice on a technical news site about a piece of software that was being developed by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.
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