http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/Quote
The science of SETI@home
SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a scientific area whose goal is to detect intelligent life outside Earth. One approach, known as radio SETI, uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. Such signals are not known to occur naturally, so a detection would provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology.
Radio telescope signals consist primarily of noise (from celestial sources and the receiver's electronics) and man-made signals such as TV stations, radar, and satellites. Modern radio SETI projects analyze the data digitally. More computing power enables searches to cover greater frequency ranges with more sensitivity. Radio SETI, therefore, has an insatiable appetite for computing power.
Previous radio SETI projects have used special-purpose supercomputers, located at the telescope, to do the bulk of the data analysis. In 1995, David Gedye proposed doing radio SETI using a virtual supercomputer composed of large numbers of Internet-connected computers, and he organized the SETI@home project to e xplore this idea. SETI@home was originally launched in May 1999.
more info
http://seticlassic.ssl.berkeley.edu/about_seti/about_seti_at_home_1.html
Quote
System requirements
* There is an initial download of about 10 MB.
* You'll need about 20 MB of free disk space and 64 MB of RAM.
* with a typical computer (such as a 2 GHz Pentium 4), you'll need to let SETI@home run for at least 2 hours per week (slower computers are fine but they'll have to run proportionally more).
seti@home basically takes your computer when its in idle and uses it unused cpu power to process data. its not a good idea to run this while playing games, but you can run it overnight while your sleeping or browsing the internet
there are also teams that compete with processing power and work units. i believe that a double digit percentage of jsp seti team members would undoubtedly destroy a good 90% of other teams out there
heres the top seti teams in the world:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/top_teams.php
theres other online projects such as:
world community grid:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/
class='quote1'>Quote World Community Grid's mission is to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity. Our work is built on the belief that technological innovation combined with visionary scientific research and large-scale volunteerism can change our world for the better. Our success depends on individuals - like you - collectively contributing their unused computer time to this not-for-profit endeavor.