Participate in the Search for Alien Life

Last year I had to come up with a yearly project at my school, that involved my interests (computers), and after a lot of searching, I got an email asking me to rejoin a project that I've done in the past, but have completely forgotten about. Bingo! 

As the (unofficial, but highly knowledgeable) BOINC Wiki says: 

Volunteers can download the BOINC software, attach to one or more of these science projects and participate in the science research. The BOINC software will run on any type of computer and just operates in the background and wont effect your normal computer use. Why leave a computer idle when it could be doing something beneficial for science?

 

Thanks to the project, I have had 2 interviews for newspapers and a spot on the SETI@Home website.

IMPORTANT: DO NOTattempt to install SETI@Home on computers that are not yours. Always get permission first!!

Lets get started! But first.....

Step 1 What's BOINC?

BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) is the volunteer program that SETI@Home runs on. In laymans terms, it acts as a middleman for the project (SETI@Home) that you decide to participate. It downloads the work units, handles communications, and runs the awesome screensaver!

BOINC can run on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Unix, and other operating systems

It can also run on CUDA. CUDA is only available for those who have a compatible NVIDIA graphics card. It utilizes the CPU on the graphics card, but most times its referred to as the GPU.

But don't despair if you don't have the proper GPU, as long as you have more than 500Mhz of processing speed, you'll be sweet! If you are a user of high gaming etc. you can configure BOINC to pause, if the load on the processor goes above a certain percentage. I have mine on 75%, but if you are running BOINC on a computer just for running it, you can set it to 100%

Comments

[taterkiller]

do you need an antenna

[must invent]

no, you'll just need internet connection

[taterkiller]

little late but thanks