Astropulse

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Astropulse is a distributed computing project that is (will be) searching for primordial black holes, pulsars, and ETI, using the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform.

Astropulse is a project that takes data from the existing SETI@home tapes and re-examines them for radio pulses that lasted only microseconds. This could indicate a pulsar or maybe a signal from an intelligent source deliberately being sent out.

Work on a new Astropulse will start once the SETI enhanced client is in general release. The Southern hemisphere is another SETI project that is due to join BOINC in the future. SETI@home beta is a test environment for these three future projects.

Astropulse was originally slated for release in 2003. Although many BOINC users worried that it had become vaporware, the beta project is now underway. Final development of astropulse has been a two-part endeavor. The first step was to complete the astropulse C++ core that can identify successfully a target pulse. Upon completion of that program, the team created a trial dataset that contained a hidden pulse, which the completed program successfully found, thus confirming the ability of the astropulse C++ core to successfully identify target pulses. The BOINC idea is to divide (split) large blocks of data into smaller units, each of which can be distributed to individual participating work stations. To this end, the project then began to embed the Astropulse C++ core into the Seti Beta client and began to distribute real data, split into astropulse work units, to a team of beta testers. The challenge is to assure that the astropulse core will work seemlessly on a broad array of operating systems. Roughly 250-400 beta testers are now actively assisting in the testing of the new Astropulse and Seti Beta clients. If successful, project proponents believe that a fully operational Astropulse will either detect exploding black holes, or establish a maximum rate of 5 x 10-14 pc-3 yr-1, a factor of 104 better than any previous survey. The future of the project depends on extended funding to SETI@home.

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