Question

What is SETI ?

How does it work? In answering this question be as specific as possible making sure you fully explore
how SETI networks individual computers making them into a powerful system.

Answer 1

SETI-Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

SETI is a particular scientific area and the main goal is to find intelligent life apart from the Earth that we are living.

To find the better way to search extraterrestrial intelligence, one must understand about our universe much better.

There are different approaches, now let us understand with one approach.

SETI radio: This approach uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from other civilizations.  

Generally people consider radio waves as "efficient way to communicate over large distances" and as it does not have any problem of noise and interference.

To understand what is happening exactly, we must have good knowledge in physics especially like electromagnetic spectrum, signals.

These days Optical communication is also became another target.

Experiments:

The Wow Signal have detected(in the year 1977) in one of the SETI experiments.

Wow Signal was a strong narrowband radio signal.

With the continued advancements in the technology, expectations for finding extraterrestrial intelligence is increasing.

You might be knowing about the SETI@home.

The work unit computations of SETI@home are independent, in this case the participanting computers never wait to communicate.

One of the recent application is "Parallel Virtual Machine software".

With noraml computers, computational power(even sometimes refered as computer performance) is a problem.

But with the SETI networks, it takes care of all the computing power available in your machine is not being wasted.

To process a large amount of data, the home computers will take many days or may be years sometimes. Buying the computational power is expensive. But SETI@home have came up with an idea/way to create that computing power.

For example: With the SETI@home screensaver installed, your computer actually processes SETI data(in idle state) and instead of displaying background video toasters, displays the work which is in progress.

The main concept is that small PCs could be used to analyze small chunks of data over the Internet.

Here fast Fourier transform method is used to analyse the chunks of data.

Altogether helps the PCs in making them into a powerful system with a good computational power.