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What Are The K Files?
This is a page devoted for some "behind the scenes" action
involved in the SETI@Home Project. It is not meant to be an all
encompassing page telling everything that is going on about the
project Some of the info you will find here will be taken from the
SETI@Home homepage, but the bulk of it will come from newsgroup (alt.sci.seti
and sci.astro.seti) postings from
SETI@Home team member Eric Korpela. Eric is probably the most
visible member of the SETI@Home team who reads these pages or happens to
browse through the SETI newsgroups. Eric regularly posts on the
newsgroups, answers questions, and also gives notices of any planned
downtime in the SETI@Home servers. I have saved most of Eric's posts
to the newsgroups and will outline posts of interest to team
members. Hopefully this page will give you a better understanding of
the people, their jobs, and the problems involved in running a project
with a large userbase.
The People
This was taken from the SETI@Home
page, but doesn't tell much about the people or their
responsibilities within the SETI project. Here is the crew:
Dr.
David P. Anderson, Project Director. David has done extensive
research in operating systems, distributed computing, and computer
graphics. He designed the SETI@home client, server, and web-site
software and data architecture.
Dan
Werthimer, Chief Scientist. Dan has been involved in SETI
observations for 20 years. He has published over 35 papers and books
on SETI, and leads the SERENDIP Project at UC Berkeley. He designed
the SETI@home analysis algorithms and data collection hardware.
Jeff Cobb, Scientific Programmer.
Dr. Eric Korpela, Research Astronomer.
Kyle Granger, Windows UI/Graphics Programmer.
Matt Lebofsky, Scientific Programmer.
Charlie Fenton, Macintosh UI/Graphics Programmer.
Peter Leiser, Programmer.
Leonard Chung, Programmer.
Who Is Dr. Eric Korpela?
There is a common misperception that the sole job of these
people is to keep the SETI@Home project up and running. Taking a
look at Eric
Korpela's homepage he is involved in several other projects
running concurrently. Here is a listing of ongoing projects Eric is
currently involved in (taken from his homepage):
- Project Scientist, EUVIP (Extreme
Ultraviolet Imaging Photometer), an EUV imaging telescope for
imaging of atmospheric and astronomical phenomena. Successully
launched aboard the ARGOS mission, Feb 23, 1999. (1996-) Woo hoo!
- The SETI@home
project. Now you can participate in the Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence from the comfort of your home. The SETI@home project
takes data from the SERENDIP
project and distributes it via the internet to millions of computers
around the world for analysis.
- EUV Observations of Neutron Stars.
(1997-)
- Managing the assembly, testing and
troubleshooting of microchannel plate detectors for the Medium
Energy Neutral Atom (MENA) imager on the IMAGE
mission. (1998-)
- EUVE NO-ID identification, EUVE and
optical observations of unidentified EUV sources in an attempt to
determine the nature of these sources. (1994-)
In actuality, Eric tries to split up his time between each of these
projects, none of them being a full time "job" per se. For
those who think that the SETI@Home project is a full time thing for him,
he gives these comments:
I'm one of three people involved in
real time operations. I do most of the database work tracking
down hackers and marking their results as invalid. My position
as liason to the newsgroups is unofficial. And, of course, I'm
only (in theory) putting in 20 hours a week on SETI@home, and 20 a
week on my other research. (Of course it usually turns in to
much more than that on either.)...
...Actually, at this point there is
not a single person that is full-time on SETI@Home. (We're
looking into hiring a full time person soon to handle database
issues.) And, as an astronomer, SETI is a very difficult thing
to build a career on. (Actually, there aren't any easy ways to
build a career as an astronomer. SETI is harder than
most.) Going into SETI full time would probably spell the end of
my career within two years.
What are his future plans? (Taken from his .plan
file):
Today: Get high
profile tenure-track faculty position.
Tomorrow: Find
endlessly renewable source of cheap energy.
Next week:
Deification. Stomp the puny mortals.
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Eric
Korpela
| The two most common things in the
korpela@ssl.berkeley.edu | universe are Hydrogen and stupidity.
| -Harlan Ellison
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/* Mountain Dew
and Ding Dongs are truly the food of the gods */
Episode
2: SETI@Home Explained!
-Lamb
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