Hello friends, Besides being heavily involved in Rocwiki, another hobby of mine is being involved with Berkeley University with the Space Sciences Lab in a project called Seti @ Home. It involves using spare CPU cycles to crunch WU's involving data from space satellite transmissions looking for extraterrestrial life—it really is fascinating. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people involved in this project. There is no cost required to be a part of this hobby.
I am also their Hardware Donation Organizer (strictly volunteer position). I receive no financial compensation in any manner. One difficulty is that the government and civic grants used to supply this project with the needed hardware are drying up. While financial donations are amazingly useful, donations of hardware are needed just as much.
If you can assist at all or have questions—or just want to join, please email me at pboulay @ rochester . rr . com All Hardware or Financial Donations are Tax-Deductible and I can put you directly in touch with the Project Manager in California. "Hardware Needed" List (as of 10/18/07): * 1 server with eight 64 bit CPU cores (8 single core, 4 dual core or 2 quad core), 32-64GB RAM, >400GB disk space (near time persistancy checker compute server) * 2 servers to serve our web site(s) (to replace old sparc solaris machines) Minimum HW is dual 32 bit CPU (with either dual core or hyper threading), 8GB RAM, 2 disks * 1 server to serve downloads (to replace old sparc solaris machine) Minimum HW is dual 32 bit CPU (with either dual core or hyperthreading), 16GB RAM, 2 disks * 1 NAS box or, better yet, a general purpose machine to use as a NAS box.
3TB Disk minimum If general purpose, Minimum HW is HW is dual 32 bit CPU (with either dual core or hyper threading), 16GB RAM (this will replace our netapp filer, which is slowly but surely heading south) * 2 desktop machines, prefer small form factor and quiet, minimum HW is 1 CPU, 2GB RAM, 250GB drive, DVD writer (to replace 400 MHz SPARC machines) * 4 UPS's: APC Smart-UPS 2200VA (rack mount version) with UPS Network Management Cards (Larger capacity exceeds capacity of our circuit breakers) * 4 750gb SATA Disks RAM and Fiber Cables are always needed. Thank you for your time.