The search for alien life continues on P2P

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) programme has released version 3 of its peer to peer screensaver software.

At the same time, the organisation has received undisclosed funding from One Cosmos Network and the Planetary society to step up its search for alien life. SETI@home records signals from space gathered by the world's largest telescope in Puerto Rico. The received signals are then distributed to be processed by the shared capacity of over two million subscribers' computers. Once the analysis is completed, the screensaver software feeds the data back to the University which looks for abnormalities in the patterns. SETI@home is based on peer-to-peer (P2P) computing model, also known as distributed computing, which redistributes the computational capacity equal to supercomputer to PCs around the world by sharing both the digital files and processing power. It allows the PC to act as both client and the server and grows the network exponentially. Other well known P2P projects include Napster, the music file sharing service. SETI@home can be found at http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/download.html