http://seti.ssl.berkeley.edu/serendip/serendip.html What is SERENDIP IV? SERENDIP IV, the latest SERENDIP instrument, consists of 40 spectrum analyzer boards working in parallel to look at 168 million narrow (0.6Hz) channels every 1.7 seconds. It is essentially a 200 billion-instructions-per-second supercomputer. We installed SERENDIP IV at the Arecibo Observatory on June 11, 1997, and have been since receiving raw data from the observatory at the rate of one megabyte every four minutes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- History of SERENDIP SERENDIP has been in operation for 19 years, beginning with SERENDIP I in 1979. The SERENDIP I instrument consisted of a 100-channel spectrum analyzer which was located at UC Berkeley's Hat Creek Observatory. Since that time, SERENDIP has undergone a series of sequential improvements. SERENDIP II, which ran from 1986 to 1988, was thousands of times more powerful than its predecessor. The second-generation instrument was able to observe 65,000 channels per second and was primarily located at the 300-foot NRAO radio telescope at Green Bank and to a lesser extent on four other high-quality telescopes around the world. SERENDIP III began operations at Arecibo in April 15, 1992. The end of its 4 year survey coincided with the beginning of a major upgrade at Arecibo. The upgrade is now complete, and SERENDIP IV was installed at Arecibo in June 1997