Jeff’s work is progressing on the NTPCkr project, which will pick out the most interesting candidates from the raw data for analysis. It looks for signals that are persistent in frequency and sky. We’re going to get the first data report in a few days now, within the next week or so, we hope to put out an early version of the NTPCKr public results page. We’re getting close to being out of SETI@Home data, unless we get RADAR blanking software working. We could pull up some old files from astropulse, we still have plenty of astropulse data.

The question was raised last week as to why astropulse is burning through the data so quickly. The problem that needs to be addressed is that the astropulse data gets split and sent out at a much higher rate than SETI@Home. The splitter only responds to demand.

An astropulse work unit takes about 12 days to complete and is about 8 MB. A SETI@Home work unit is about 1/3 MB. That means that astropulse has to be around 25 times slower than SETI@Home in order for them to chew at the same rate. So, it has always been the case that astropulse works faster than SETI@Home.

The main thing that should do is check the data on both projects weekly and make sure that the data coming back from the clients is reasonable, that we have the correct number of Gaussians, etc. In conclusion, in order to rule out client failures as a reason why we are burning through the data so fast, we really we need to look at the results, not only at how fast they are splitting.

Matt is working on cosmetic stuff for the NTPCkr website, for example, he wrote the first set of the Cron job that will run daily. It would be nice to get it online now, but it would take all day to run. He is also developing an exciting new forum for SETI@Home users to discuss scientific results from NTPCkr.

He’s also been working on is the RADAR blanking, which consists of blanking out local earth-bound radar data from our database.

Bob announced that our a new server, named mork, and it continues to operate nicely. We also received a donation of some new, third generation, solid-state disc drives. They have faster access times for reading and random writing, and will help take the load off the other drives. We aren’t going to use them for the database proper, yet. They are new Intel technology, and we’d like to test them out first. One the new discs can do around 3,000 read I/O’s per second, which is a lot better than the old discs. Dan wanted to know if we weren’t going to use them if he could stick them in his laptop. Bob said no way; we’re going to use them!

But if we test out the new discs, evaluate them, and find out that they are really great, could we get, ten or twenty more to replace the old ones? It is something to consider.

In astropulse news, the big thing that Josh has been working on lately is filling up a big RFI database. It would be nice to have some help trying to figure that out. That could be something that Adam could work on. Adam is a Berkeley Astrophysics student and he’s interested in working on astropulse with Josh. He could look for problems in the database by generating a fake pulse and running it through the algorithm, because it is not always possible to see the finer details simply by looking for flagged data in the database.

Also, the proceedings for the Bioastronomy Conference that took place in 2007 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, will finally be done. The call for papers was a long time ago, but there is still an opportunity for us to get a SETI paper in there if we do it in the next week or so. Dan asked Josh if could put together a paper centered on SETI@Home as Bioastronomy to be submitted for publication, since he attended the conference in 2007. Josh will see what he can do.

That is all for this week from the Space Sciences Lab, see you next Monday.