SETI@Home: Special Fundraiser for Parkes Data Store and GPU development system

Thanks to our collaboration with Breakthrough Listen and their international colleagues, we will soon have the ability to access data recorded at the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia. For the first time, this will give us full-sky coverage, including the southern hemisphere, in our search for ET. However, due to the enormous amount of data that the 13-beam receiver at Parkes can generate, we will require extra hardware to store and distribute it. We need your help to purchase this.

Thanks to some special offers, one from the Hanson Family in memory of Robert W. & Mary P. Hanson, one from Richard Haselgrove in memory of his mother, Jenifer Leech, and one from Mr. Kevvy, we have the possibility to match donations which will allow us to purchase the Parkes Data store server (~$34K) and the GPU development systems (~$10K) we will need for the coming year. For every dollar you donate in this special fund raiser, Mr. Kevvy will match it, the Hanson Family will match it with two, and Richard Haselgrove will match it with two more. That means for every dollar you donate we'll get six dollars towards the purchase of these servers!

Because this is a special fundraiser we'll have special notation on your account page and on the forums. The 12TB disk drives in the Parkes Data Store cost $450. One sixth of that is $75. So, a donation of $75 or more gets you a disk drive icon. The GPUs in the GPU development machine that we will be using for our recording systems at future telescopes are $1500 each, so a donation over $250 will get you a GPU icon. And as always, any donation of $10 or more will get you a green star.

But in the end, it's not about the icons: it's about getting the data and making a discovery for the ages. Your help, whether by crunching data or by donating, is always appreciated.

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