SETI & Crunching news

For a couple of reasons, the result table has grown to the point where it no longer fits in main memory. That has been slowing the validators and assimilators, which is causing the result table to grow further.

We'd like to get it down to a manageable size before our Tuesday outage. To that end we are throttling work generation to a rate at which the table size is shrinking. We hope that this rate will increase as the table gets smaller.

So for the next few days work will be hard to come by (but not zero).

Check out Stars in Their Eyes?, a research paper from the University of Geneva about why people run SETI@home.

Mr. Kevvy and the GPU Users Group have graciously convened a fundraiser to help modernize our aging storage infrastructure. Thank you Mr. Kevvy and GPUUG!

It's the Friday before a holiday week and the servers know it.

The file system containing the beta project uploads directory is having problems, so beta is down until further notice.

This problem may be affecting the rate at which the main project can handle results, so the validation and assimilation queues are getting large, which may affect the rate of work generation.

Dr. Korpela and his colleagues Prof. Shauna Sallmen and Ms. Kaisa Crawford-Taylor have published a new paper today in the Astronomical Journal about whether astronomers be able to detect belts of satellites circling planets around other stars. Unfortunately, the answer is that even the thickest satellite belts will be very difficult to see with current technology. Even the James Webb Space Telescope will find it difficult.

If, like most sentient beings in the Galaxy, you don't have a subscription to the Astronomical Journal you can see a preprint of the article at arXiv.org.

We've started our 2019 funding drive. Many of you have probably received our email penned by Jeff Cobb who has been in the SETI group longer than I have. If you can't wait, you can read yours here.

Because of our continued effort to be GDPR compliant, we're not sending emails to anyone with an EU/EAA email addresses, anyone who listed an EU/EAA country, or anyone who listed "International" as their country. And, of course, anyone who has opted out of our emails won't get them.

Thanks for your support!

Richard Lawn has posted a new SETI Perspectives entitled "Is ET in Our Solar System?"

Check out All in the Timing, a report on recent progress in SETI@home's back-end data analysis.

SETI@home member Morris Penasso has developed a SETI@home News "skill" for Amazon Alexa/Echo that can tell you the latest from our news feed.
You can get it here.

Large swaths of Northern California, including the UC Berkeley Campus, are under a Public Safety Power Shutoff due to high winds and the associated wildfire risks. Our servers are located in the campus Data Center which is protected by a high capacity UPS. We expect that our servers will remain up for the duration of the outage. Thus far Internet connectivity also remains up although this depends on factors outside of the Data Center.