About a week ago, the SETI@home project celebrated their one-year anniversary.

To mark the occasion, the group running the project has posted a
small picture gallery showing a birthday cake :), the team members,
and a few pics of the servers.  (It's amazing to me that such a massive,
global project is has delivered such a tremendous amount of data with
such relatively modest office space and equipment.)

   http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/anniversary.html


Also, in conjunction with the Planetary Society, they have made available
a downloadable "Certificate of Appreciation" (724K).  It's an Acrobat PDF
file that lets you fill in your name.  Actually, it's quite nice.

   http://planetary.org/UPDATES/seti/seti_certificate_instructions.html


One has to admire the results of such distributed processing.  I mean,
here the project (specifically, the Windows and Mac client software;
I don't know about the entire SETI@home project) is only "one year old,"
but our own Jeff Kell (aka Sharkman) has racked up nearly TEN YEARS of
CPU time towards the effort! (In terms of results received, though,
John Zoltak -- with "only" about 6.5 years of CPU time -- continues
his heroic effort to catch up, now lagging by only 140 work units.)

Of course, such distributed processing efforts can only be as successful
as the amount of horsepower devoted to them.  The SETI@home people got
lucky; so many people have embraced the project for a variety of reasons:
to participate in a real honest-to-goodness science project; in the hope
of being "the machine" to find ET; or even just acknowledging the general
waste of CPU cycles of an inactive machine, and wanting to help "something."

Perhaps the Human Genome project (or whatever its real name is) would be
complete by now if they had adopted a similar approach.

I'm hard-pressed to think of a computationally-expensive problem in a field
other than science (including medicine) that would so grab people's
imagination.

--Glenn

P.S.  If you're not yet participating in the SETI@home project, or you are
      but your work units are being tallied under another team, you can visit

         http://www.software-al-dente.com/seti.html

      for more info about joining Team HP3000-L.  Note that, unfortunately,
      a SETI@home client does not exist for the e3000.