Coordinated Chaos

MISSION: A well coordinated effort (LOL) to make use of idle computer processors by participating in a great scientific effort.

GOAL: To be competitive with other SETI@Home clubs and groups by being in the top 100 clubs and the top 200 overall groups worldwide.

WHY YOU SHOULD JOIN: Even if you are a power user on your computer, 99% of the time the microprocessor is simply sitting there, waiting for you to do something. Even with modern multitasking operating systems with their scheduled events and bloated overhead, your computer is just an idling waste of power. SETI@Home is a volunteer effort to analyze downloaded radio telescope data which takes unimaginably large volumes of computing power to process. For this, they have a system of what is called "distributed computing" to diseminate this data in small, managable blocks to computers around the world for analysis. Their client program is an impressive application that only uses wasted processor cycles from your computer to analyze this data. A new, single data block is downloaded in just a few seconds (even on a regular modem) whenever your computer is online and has finished analyzing a data block. You won't even know it is happening. Meanwhile, your computer, which is millions of times more sophisticated than what we used to send people to the moon with, is using 100% of its computing power for a higher purpose other than swapping e-mail and playing solitare. Your computer will not be slowed down; you will not know SETI@Home is even running. Best of all, you are participating in a massive, important scientific volunteer effort without doing a thing.

WHY EVEN THE UNENTHUSIASTIC SHOULD JOIN:

• "But I don't believe in ET life." - Then you're just helping to prove your point.
• "I am a creationist." - Do you believe that God created trillions of planets and put people in his image on only ONE planet to worship him?
• "I am an evolutionist." - If life evolved here, then it surely evolved elsewhere. Even if the odds were only one in a trillion of life evolving on a planet, then the odds are quite good that life 'as we know it' exists elsewhere in this universe.

INSTALLING SETI@Home: Download the client program. Run the program by double clicking it after you have downloaded it. Answer the questions. You are now running SETI@Home on your computer. If you can't do it yourself, bring your computer to us and we'll install it for you. :-)

JOINING Coordinated Chaos: Click here to join Coordinated Chaos.

PERFORMANCE TUNING: SETI@Home makes a very cool screen saver. However, drawing all of the spectral analysis information on the screen slows SETI@Home down dramatically (it takes time to continuously draw all of those graphics). For maximum performance (minimum turn around time) on a PC, set your SETI@Home application to the following settings. Go to Settings => Preferences. Set to "Data analysis always runs". For best results also click on "Connect automatically whenever needed". This works well with ADSL, cable, or computers that have their own telephone line, but may not work well for people with dialup and a shared telephone line for voice and data.