SETI@home Expands Its Back Yard

SETI@home, the peer-to-peer computing project that ties together millions of computers to examine radio waves coming from space, has 3 million users — and thousands of new people sign up to crunch data each day — making the entire SETI@home network more powerful than the biggest of supercomputers. So powerful, indeed, that there is the possibility of running out of data to process. To solve this problem, SETI@home is installing a Linux-based, super-fast digital data recorder that was donated by Hewlett-Packard. According to the company, the new machine can record data 10 times faster than the previous recorder