First brought up here at Slashdot, the 500,000 members of the SETI@Home project is analyzing the same few blocks of data from January 7-9th over and over again, making no progress in the search. Apparently, this is confirmed on the SETI FAQ and on their homepage. Instead of analyzing the 35 GB per day of data they receive from the Areceibo, Puerto Rico radio signal dish, they're still analyzing those January dates over and over. To confirm this in your own client, look at the records for blocks you've analyzed, and you'll recognize that you may get the same block again, and all blocks are from that specific range of dates six months ago.

Some have even suggested that the sum of the blocks analyzed is only 35 MB ever, compared to the capacity of 35 GB per day the system should be capable of. SETI@Home is a program run by Berkeley that uses distributed computing to analyze radio signals from outer space to search for intelligent life. There's similar programs run by distributed.net that attempts to break several levels of encryption, and RC5 seems to be the most popular. This project does not analyze the same data over and over, but new sets of 'keyblocks' for each project participant.

Some participants have reported displeasure that SETI@Home's organizers did not make this more abundantly clear at the beginning of the project. Some even suggested they'd quit their clients until this situation was resolved. In SETI@Home's defense, they make the problem known on the site now, promising to fix the problem 'shortly. Keep your browser pointed here or SETI@Home's homepage for more info when the problem is finished. Until it's fixed, we suggest using your spare CPU cycles on RC5 or other distributed computing projects. We'd love to hear any comments you have about this, so contact us.

Written/Edited/Published by Doug B. Landry
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