The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence at UC Berkeley

Jeff has been looking at splitter beam problems we’ve been experiencing as of late. The splitter is not able to process all beams because one of our two data streams is having a problem where it will miss buffers, thowing throws the blanking signals out of sync. Maybe he could figure out how many buffers were missed and then correct for it later.

Also, NTPKCr is running really slow right now.

Dave had no news for this week.

setiathome: setiathome's twitter feed is up and running again! - setiathome: setiathome's twitter feed is up and running again! [SETI@home on Twitter]

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Seti@Home's twitter feed is now fully functional, and will be updated regularly. Check back to this site to see the RSS feed, or just follow us on twitter!

Eric is working on proposals for most this week, and is still hard at work on Zone RFI Definitions.

Dave asked for hardware that he could use for BOINC. He has the BOINC alfa project running, and he’d like to have a separate server to run projects on. Eric said it would be fine if he ran it on marvin, it’s pretty stable, so it should be alright.

Jeff, recently back from Nepal, didn’t have too much to say today, but right now he is working on testing out the RADAR blanking software with Matt. He also shared a fantastic photo (one of 1600) of the Himalayas. Although his trip was great fun, he did admit that it was a “scientific wash”—there was no Yeti to be found.

Dave is back from the BOINC conference over in Europe. There was a lot of people there, a lot of talks and papers. The main topics of discussion were GPUs and computing in virtual machines.

There are just a few short updates from this week's meeting:

One interesting proposition came up: Our science database, which runs on Informix, is having performance problems, and it was suggested that we consider moving to a different engine. Part of the problem is that NITPKcr hasn’t been able to really run on the Science database. The current solution: We will commission an unpaid undergraduate to do a feasibility study on a potential switch.

Fall weather has finally set in Berkeley CA and the SETI team met this week at the Space Sciences Lab despite the tempestuous rainstorm outside.

Bob reported that last week we accidentally stopped replicating beta, so we have to restart it this week. Other than that everything is going fine.

Sorry to all of you who looked in vain for the meeting notes last week. The meeting last week was rather small, and there was not too much going on— Matt and Eric just spent all day doing server cleanup. And well, to be perfectly honest, the meeting note taker had some Physics homework to attend to.

But here's what happened this week:

Bob reported that we had a weird thing happen in the database world. So we did have to turn off the replication for the week and we hope to restart it by tomorrow. Everything else seems to be going OK

Monday 5 October @ 18:30 (evening talk)
Public lecture at the MTN ScienCenter, Cape Town, South Africa
"Is Anybody Out There? The Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations"

Canal Walk Shopping Centre
Shop 407
Upper level, Entrance 5
GPS: S33°53.656 E18°30.571

This week will be a very short science meeting: Dan and Andrew are in South Africa, Jeff is on his vacation, Dave just left for a rehearsal, and Adam is not around. So, it will be a very short and sweet meeting today.

First of all, we did run out of Astropulse data this weekend, but Bob started moving stuff around so we are back up already. We are looking for a new disk to come in from Arecibo.

In Bob’s database news: As we noted in our server meeting, we had an unremarkable weekend, which was actually remarkable. We had to add some space to the Beta Database, but everything worked out fine.

After looking through a few thousand waterfall plots, Adam found a few pulses. He looked at 3000, and there are about 30,000 of them. Josh looked through his 10 minutes of data and also saw a pulse. After closer inspection, it is pretty clear that they are looking at the same pulse. Good work!