A whole new bowl game

ASEE Prism, Jan 2000

AND NOW, TURNING To SPORTS news: Team Husky from the Michigan Technological University remains in first place, followed by Indiana University in second and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in third. But don't discount a big push from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, now in seventh place. What game pits such a diverse group of schools against each other? Hockey? Football? Hacky-Sack? No, it's the search for extraterrestrial life, better known as SETI.

Last May, the University of CaliforniaBerkeley released the SETI@home screensaver software that lets any Windows or Macintosh desktop computer join in the search of the cosmos for alien intelligence. The program analyzes data collected by the 1,000-foot diameter radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, then automatically sends results to Berkeley. And many universities around the world-particularly technical schools-have formed teams to see who can analyze the most data.

The screensaver has proven popular well beyond academia. More than a million computers worldwide are now using it, and SETI@home is now the largest computation ever done on this planet. We've accumulated more than 50,000 years of computing time so far," says Dan Werthimer, a research physicist at Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory.

As for the college combatants, Berkeley keeps track of how well each team is doing-a sort of Big 100 for the Space Bowl. At last count, Team Husky had crunched and returned to Berkeley 67,778 results, compared with 60,223 results from Indiana University. And despite its home-field advantage, Berkeley was in fifth place with 38,697.