Martin Andersen <martin@al-data.dk> wrote in message news:<41057887$0$236$edfadb0f@dread16.news.tele.dk>...

It's about here it's getting interesting !

For the first time ever humankind has a real chance to find
out if it's alone in the Galaxy, or is sharing it with other species.

Er... No. Humankind actually already knows that it's not alone a few
thousands years ago, only that in the last few hundreds years
especially in the last few decades, we are being duped into thinking
that we alone.

The new telescope, the Allen telecope array will go online next year,
and in a few years several hundred thousand stars will be scanned for 
signals, compared to about 1000 stars with today's technology.

SETI will need all the computer power it can get,
so don't chicken out now !

Well... All that computer power would be useless if S.E.T.I. don't
have the enough bandwidth to receive back all of those result of the
calculation.

I heard that S.E.T.I. intentionally don't implement vector execution
units in some processors for their public release of their software
(they do implement it in a special version that they shown to the
public), since that if they do implement it, they are flooded with so
much calculation result that their bandwidth would be overfilled.
Obviously, super computers need not to apply for S.E.T.I.'s
distributed computing.


It should be noted that you don't really know if the S.E.T.I. program
is really processing astronomical data or something else.

Martin.