SETI@Home, the grandfather of the distributed computing programs like Folding@Home has benefited greatly from the continual increase of computational power and is perhaps one of the best reasons to own a multicore processor.  At its heart it has not changed, the search algorithms that are used have not changed and they continue to search the same wavelengths as they have for over a decade.  There is plenty of sky left to search on those wavelengths but there are of course many others to be searched, if only there was a solid algorithm to sort through the noise to find any signal.  To that extent the SETI@Home institute has put out a call to anyone who wants to develop new ways to analyze the skies.  Drop by Slashdot to find out how to participate.

“For years, people have been using SETI@Home to help search for signs of extraterrestrial life in radio telescope data. But Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute, wants to take things to the next level. Whereas SETI@Home basically used people’s computers as part of a giant distributed network to run a fixed set of filters written by SETI researchers, Tarter thinks someone out there may have even better search algorithms that could be applied. She’s teamed with a startup called Cloudant to make large volumes of raw data from the new Allen telescope available, and free Amazon EC2 processing time to crunch the data. According to Tarter: ‘SETI@Home came on the scene a decade ago, and it was brilliant and revolutionary. It put distributed computing on the map with such a sexy application. But in the end, it’s been service computing. You could execute the SETI searches that were made available to you, but you couldn’t make them any better or change them. We’d like to take the next step and invite all of the smart people in the world who don’t work for Berkeley or for the SETI Institute to use the new Allen Telescope. To look for signals that nobody’s been able to look for before because we haven’t had our own telescope; because we haven’t had the computing power.'”

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