SETI @ home project and its website

SETI@home (SETI is an acronym of Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence)[1] attempts to harness the massive computing power distributed over the Internet to accomplish the Herculean task of analyzing radio telescope data for signals from extra-terrestrial intelligence. SETI@home follows a "Divide and Conquer" paradigm wherein huge sets of data are processed and divided into small chunks which are then distributed to other machines for processing. Following processing, results are passed to a central repository. The divide and conquer paradigm is not new. It has been used within local intranets with great success. However, SETI@home casts its net wider, making use of computing resources around the Internet. Computers around the Internet function together as a parallel computing system. Unlike traditional distributed systems, the computers linked via the Internet have a variety of operating systems, processor architectures, and physical locations. The sheer number of processors available allows SETI@home access to more processing power than any existing supercomputer. In fact it has been said: