seti@home
"Is there anybody out there ?" - everyone knows that famous line from Pink Floyd's "The Wall" Album. I think, that we are most definitely not alone out here in the universe. Think about it, our Galaxy is so big and there are many more, so why should there be only us ? Seti@home is a Berkeley project which makes use of the huge amount of wasted computing capacity on our globe to analyse the data collected by the deep space telescope in Arichebo.
When I heard about the project many years ago, I did not have to think twice - I had to participate. Minutes later I had the SETI Client up and running on my Linux box and that is where it is still crunching numbers day in, day out. But the client also makes use of any other idling computer may it be windows or a Mac. One can even run it while the screen saver is on, so even that computer time is used very well. Talking about computing time, my trusty linux box has spent 27,201 hours, computing more than 2,534 result sets before I joined the german SETI team.
Meanwhile there are even more projects which use the idea of the gigantic and worldwide computing grid, check it out !
Please also visit the web site of the SETI Team Germany.