SETI@home is an experiment being run by the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence folks. The object is to harness the idle computing capacity of the millions of computers out there that are always on but frequently idle for hours at a time. As of 1 May, 2001, nearly 650,000 CPU-years of time have been donated by the public, who download raw data from the SETI site and then process it whenever the computer runs a special screensaver. Do yourself a favor and download the SETi@home screensaver. Turn those idle kilowatts coursing through your PC into crunching power to decode the single most important piece of information ever heard by humankind: evidence that intelligence exists throughout the universe.

The statistics pages of SETI@home provide some interesting data on computing power available in the world today. Intel microprocessors have processed more data by nearly 10-fold than the next most productive chip, the PowerPC. They've weathered 550,000 CPU-years of signal processing.   The fastest chip in the SETI world, which may well be THE world, is the Alpha EV67. It takes 1 hour to process a block of data that a Pentium chip needs 18 hours to do. I wonder how Photoshop would run on one of those.

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