Crazybob's Son @ SETI.USA

The only payoff is the arbitrary "Credit" value assigned to each workunit as well as the satisfaction of knowing you are helping research. If you are more competitive in nature, there is a payoff when the team beats out the production and overall credit of other teams (currently working on passing L'Alliance Francophone and SETI.Germany for overall credit). This is exactly correct. Most research projects are not-for-profit so they don't have a lot of funding to go out and purchase $10-20,000 in computers/servers to analyze their data for them. So instead they farm out the data analysis to people's home computers which then send the results back to the project when completed. This allows them to review the results at a high level and then focus more on the promising results to quicken the time to a resolution. Yeah, it really doesn't give you too much details with the screen saver which is why most people on our team turn off the screen saver (as this wastes valuable cpu cycles that could be used for crunching more data. To make sure you join the team, you can go to this page as this has the majority of the projects that we participate in. There are a few that are newer and not on that page but those can be accessed on a one-off situation. Just a note that is not on that projects page is the WUProp@home Project. This project will run alongside your primary project and provide information about each workunit that your computer analyzes giving the distributed computing world valuable information as to which projects can be ran from their PC. Also, there are quite a few projects that will run on the newer PCI-e x16 video cards. Our team has compiled a list of video cards that will crunch here. For ATI there is Collatz Conjecture and Milkyway@home For Nvidia you can also run Collatz Conjecture, GPUGRID, PrimeGrid, or SETI@home. Out of these, PrimeGrid awards the best credit. Hopefully my information above has answered most of your questions. - Jason aka Crazybob's Son @ SETI.USA

I will second that, as well as make note if you have an Nvidia card of 8400GS or higher, or ATI card in the 38xx or 48xx series this could make a HUGE addition to our team.

Yes, this will use all cores. It also takes into consideration virtual cores. (ex: i7 = 4physical and 4virtual cores, would run 8 workunits simultaneously).

Up until last month when I pulled the guts out to upgrade, my father and I had been running this on a P3 800mhz PC since I got it sometime from 2000-2001. I know my father has an old PII 450Mhz up and running this in his office at work as well. You'd be surprised at the minimal resources necessary (for some projects) to assist in Distributed Computing.

Excellent description there Denim. I just wanted to add a bit more clarification. First, I wanted to add that no matter how large a team is, there is always room for growth. We are the largest US based team (although we are not US only) and one of the largest teams around the world. Although our team name states SETI in the name, we are also not a SETI@home only team. We currently hold a Top 10 position in 65 of the 79 current BOINC projects, 48 of which are Top 5 positions, of those 22 are individual project #1's. We also hold the #1 position for Overall Boinc credit with 2.3 Billion Credits. A list of all individual projects and a summary of their goals can be found here The BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) software was actually designed by the University of California @ Berkeley for distributed computing and technically does not run in the background (as you can see an icon in the systray). The applications for each of the projects runs in the background. These applications are designed to run at a low priority (can be viewed in task manager). Since these applications are a low priority and the standard for anything else is "Normal" priority, the operating system will free up any resources that are needed for anything that you may want to do. I will agree that some of our team members have crazy computing power. (Insert Uncle Ben quote here..) With computers as with anything, the more you have the more eventual problems you have. With the vast number of members and computers that we have aligned to our team, we also have a vast knowledge base for troubleshooting pretty much any problem you may run into. I think that's all my clarifications/additions there. Hope to see everyone around the team message boards. - Jason aka Crazybob's Son