Divide and conquer
Spare computing capacity scattered around a zillion desktops could soon be worth real money
THE most powerful computer in the world is sitting neither in a secret military base, nor in a university laboratory, nor even in a garage in Silicon Valley. It is, in fact, nowhere in particular. Part of it may even be on your desk. The computer in question is a “distributed” device that consists of over 2m separate machines sprinkled around the Internet, all running a screen-saver called SETI@home. This piece of software downloads chunks of data from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and, when the machine it is installed on is not doing anything else, scrutinises them for evidence of signals from alien civilisations, sending the results back to a central clearing-house.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Divide and conquer”
From the July 29th 2000 edition
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