Impressive. I just thought of a 'practical' use for this sort of computation, which I am sure has already been thought of on a test-bed basis: Cracking encrypted messages. However, my idea would be more of an implementation and application rather than conceptual. Its obvious that military and civilian governement intelligence agencies have a need for this type of application for practical use. The idea is developing a screensaver like the seti one that instead works to crack high level encrypted messages, one key at a time. The customer would install the program on all machines in the organization, and the screensaver would interact with a cryptanalysis server somewhere on the organization WAN, exchanging double key encrypted packets of data that is made up of the encrypted information that needs to be cracked. That way, the actual user of the PC never knows what the data is that the program is trying to crack, so compartmentalized operations security is maintained, yet you take adva ntage of all computing capacity in the organization.
Mike Lorrey
Eugene Leitl wrote:
> http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/stats/totals.html
>
> Totals
>
> Last updated: Wed May 19 17:12:26 1999
>
> Users
> 206492
> Work units sent
> 465318
> Results received
> 88250
> Total CPU time
> 2564639 hr 08 min 16.5 sec
> ( 292.77 years)
> Average CPU time
> per work unit
> 29 hr 03 min 39.8 sec