A week or so ago, we reported that the SETI@Home project, a distributed computing program, had been sending the same work units over and over to the programs 500,000 participants. However, they seem to have fixed all the issues that were causing this, and are sending out new work units.

SETI@Home is a program run by Berkeley that uses distributed computing to analyze radio signals from outer space to search for intelligent life.The program has received some new donated hardware and has put some more work in on fixing the problems according to their tech update page. They've got a multi-month backlog of data from the radio telescope in Puerto Rico, so the same work units should not be duplicated further. If you've got extra CPU cycles, now is the best time to join up with SETI@Home, or other distributed projects. There are similar programs run by distributed.net that attempts to break several levels of encryption, and RC5 seems to be the most popular.

Distributed computing is a concept that uses the 'spare' CPU cycles of many different participants to collect the combined computing power. The way SETI@Home works is quite simple. Data from the radio telescope is mailed to Berkeley, at the rate of 35 GB a day. Then that data is broken up into 'work units' to be sent to each participant's computer. Their computer analyzes the data for any anomalies that may show extra-terrestrial intelligence. When a work unit is completed, the computer sends in its report and requests a new unit.

Written/Edited/Published by Doug B. Landry
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