Dan is out of the office this week, so the weekly meeting will be pretty quick and the updates will be short. Nonetheless, here is what is going on this week at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab:

In the Radar blanking project that Matt has been working on, there has been yet another snag. He is working on ways of blocking out Radar and other signals that originate Earth from SETI@Home data. The problem is that when he correlates the observed Radar with the fake Radar he created, they are out of phase.

When the telescope gets blasted (hit by the radar) it, the plot will look like a sawtooth shape. Matt made a fake saw tooth-shaped Radar, and it correlated with the actual Radar much worse than a Gaussian shape did. Eric noted that using a Gaussian should work fine, just as long as the width of the pattern you’re correlating with is wider than the width of the usual deviations due to the real Radar. In order to make the Radar blanking work properly, we need to get a little more accuracy so that it doesn’t go out of phase so fast.

The NTPCkr stuff for the new online features is also in the works. There are some things that we want to implement sooner, such as caching the data plots, maybe even the waterfall plots. We’re working on making a feature that pulls frequency and time out of the database to make more interesting plots in the future, but for now the plots will only be frequency. Hopefully we’ll be getting new stuff up on the website in the next few days.

In BOINC news, Dave announced that we now have support for detecting ATI GPUS in BOINC. GPU is an acronym for Graphics processing Unit, and they are the chips do the graphics in computers, the graphics for video games, and the calculations to draw 3D graphics (hence their importance to SETI@Home). GPUs are often 50-100 times faster than CPUs, It is important for programs with a lot of computing to do (like SETI@Home) to run on GPUs, and soon they will be the major source of our computing power. However, they are more difficult to program. The two companies that make GPUS are NVIDIA and ATI. NVIDIA has already helped us run a version of their programs on GPUs. So while we currently support Invidia GPUs, we are looking into using ATI on GPUS to reach more people (a lot of Mac computers run on ATI GPUs) and get more even more computing power.

Jeff reported that the new Intel high performance server is working well. So well, in fact, that we should be able to make it the primary server in a week or so. Also, are going to take mork down in order to put in the new solid-state drives that we got last week before bringing it back up. In terms of raw data, we’ve gotten two drives in from Arecibo and we’ve been feeding that data in all week, so we have plenty of data for users at home to help with.

That is all for this week!