Volunteer@Home

SETI@home has two different searches that look through radio signals collected from space to find communications from Extra Terrestrials. The first program, the original SETI@Home, spends its time sorting through radio waves that originate from earth and satellites, galactic noise, and "other natural astronomical phenomena". Persistency plays an important role in ruling out signals that are not wanted. For example, if a signal is heard when the telescope is pointed at a certain object in the sky, the radio waves are assumed to be interference the first time they are heard. However, if the signal repeats several times at different times of observation, it becomes more likely that it may be originating from the remote point in the sky at which the telescope is pointing rather than unwanted interference. Other things need to be taken into accounting such as frequency of the radio waves.

Astropulse is a different type of SETI but it is hosted by the same organization that runs the original SETI@Home. If you are running the original, and your computer meets the minimum requirements, your BOINC client will automatically download Astropulse work units. Astropulse is also a radio wave search, but instead of looking at narrowband signals, it analyzes broad-band pulses of radio activity. These pulses last only microseconds and can be anything from extra terrestrial communication to pulsars, RRATS, black holes, and any as-yet-undiscovered source.

As reported in this article, SETI@Home gained use of a multi-beam receiver. This will allow recording more sensitive data at seven points in the sky at simultaneously.

This is the first Volunteer Computing project to become popular. It was created at Berkeley by the same people who are now developing the popular BOINC software platform. This project uses the BOINC Platform.