SETI@home

[Psychonaut]

I was listening to Dr. Michio Kaku's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michio_Kaku) weekly radio program over the weekend and he was speaking with the current director of the SETI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI) project. A point of great interest to me was the SETI@home (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home) project that's being run through the University of California at Berkely. Basically, if you download a special screensaver program from SETI, whenever your screensaver kicks in, your computer transforms into a processing unit that's linked into the SETI mainframe. The results so far have acheived, according to the radio program, the largest computer network connected to a single mainframe in human history. If you're interested, you can get the software from the SETI@home (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/) website.

[Liffrea]

I had this running on my PC some years back, then I had to re-format it and I never got around to downloading it again. I don’t really see SETI finding anything to be honest, but it’s a well considered project.

[Skandi]

Been running it for the last 8 years :) have about 90000 units but that's not much a lot of users run it on their networks after office hours.

[Eldritch]

Since I'm a bit of a technological Luddite, I have yet to explore these possibilities.

The idea seems good, but what's the reality? Any performance or security issues I should be aware of?