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Astropulse is a distributed computing project that uses volunteers around the globe to lend their unused computing power to search for primordial black holes, pulsars, and extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). Volunteer resources are harnessed through Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform. In 1999, the Space Sciences Laboratory launched SETI@home, which would rely on massively parallel computation on desktop computers scattered around the world. SETI@home utilizes recorded data from the Arecibo radio telescope and searches for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space, signifying the presence of extraterrestrial technology. It was soon recognized that this same data might be scoured for other signals of value to the astronomy and physics community. == Development == For about 6 years, Astropulse existed in an experimental beta testing phase not available to the general community. In July 2008, Astropulse was integrated into SETI@home, so that the massive network of SETI participants could also contribute to the search for other astronomical signals of value. Astropulse also makes contributions to the search for ET: first, project proponents believe it may identify a different type of ET signal not identified by the original SETI@Home algorithm; second, proponents believe it may create additional support for SETI by providing a second possible concrete result from the overall search project. Final development of Astropulse has been a two-part endeavor. The first step was to complete the Astropulse C++ core that can successfully identify 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 core to successfully identify target pulses. Since July 2008, research has focused on a series of refinements to the Beta version which are then rolled out to the full universe of SETI participants. At the programming level, developers first seek to assure that new versions are compatible with a variety of platforms, after which the refined version is optimized for greater speed. As of April, 2009, Astropulse is testing Beta version 5.05. The future of the project depends on extended funding to SETI@home. 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 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 has been to assure that the Astropulse core will work seamlessly on a broad array of operating systems. Current research focuses on implementing algorithm refinements that eliminate or reduce false positives. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Astropulse」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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