The Search Continues…

When my friend Tanim introduced me to SETI@home back in 1999, I wasn’t really convinced. Sure I did believe in the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, but I couldn’t sum up how analysing radio frequencies can detect alien life forms. I went through the entire site, read other literatures, but still didn’t had a positive attitude to this project.

Then on one fine morning, Tanim challenged me to beat him on SETI@home. That is, getting more Work Units (WU) than he does. He had around 100 WU at that time, and I had none. I accepted the challenge, and that was the beginning. The poor chap was ultimately beaten, but it took me another year to do so.

Later, I retired from the project when the “classic” SETI@home program was closed down. Sure the BOINC client was there, but for some reason I couldn’t use it on any of my computers. Neither at home, neither at school, nor at work. After a long break I tried running BOINC this year, and it finally worked. So I started contributing my CPU cycles once again.

It took me few months to get into the top 10 list of Bangladesh, and after another few months I touched the 10,000 credits mark today (yeah!):

I’ll continue running the program, my goal now is to reach the top position on the country list. Sure it’ll take a long time and a lot of computing power, but it sure can be achieved. The search for the extraterrestrial intelligence will continue…