La banque d'un monde qui change 2004 - BNP Paribas

Seti@homeAlex OultonParticipant in Seti@home, ITBNP Paribas - TokyoFor decades, people have been transmittingmessages of friendship across the Cosmosin the hope of establishing contact withintelligent life beyond Earth. So far,barring the possibility of a cover-upby scientists, no answer has beenreceived. Researchers from the Searchfor Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute(Seti), a project based in the Universityof California Berkeley, have been working onthe assumption that perhaps extraterrestrialsmay be trying to contact us. For several years,they have been using a giant radio-telescope“to scan” the Cosmos for radio signals fromouter space. But given the magnitudeof the Universe, even the most powerfulsupercomputer would find it impossible toprocess the mountains of data thatSeti’s computers at Berkeley receivein real time. “Around the world,millions of computer workstations are leftrunning at night when systems are idle.”Even when users are in front of their screens,much of the time their computers are not busy.“By installing a small program that runsin the background, this processing capacitycould be exploited for other purposes.”For example, to examine the skyfor signals from extraterrestrials...“Thanks to the distributed computing powerof thousands of networked computers,radio-telescope data can be analysedmuch more quickly.” But the spare CPUcycles of computers can also be put to otheruses here on Earth, such as in the searchfor multi-million digit prime numbers.Thousands of HomeComputers Listening tothe Sounds of the Universe01001001010101001001001011111010100100000100110010101010100010010101001010010100100101010