Seti at Lazy town

Magnus Scheving is a great sports artist and my kids love his show Lazy Town on TV. Playing the role as Sportacus, he promotes fresh apples and other fruit as so called powersnacks to motivate the children eating more healthy food.

In that series is a guy called Pixel and he is something like a kid computer freak. His room is completely filled with lots of tech stuff and monitors. And guess what I detected running on one of them.

Pixel is running the classic SETI@HOME screensaver application searching for extraterristic intelligence (aliens) and crunching the digitized radio telescope data.

SETI is based on BOINC, a grid computing software, helping out scientist groups and universities solving huge problems, only can be calculated by supercomputers. It splits the tasks into small pieces, which can be done on almost every computer having a internet connection.

That great software is made for all common operating systems. It runs in the background and when the user is idle it does its work using the CPU and will transfer the completed results and grab new tasks.

Completed tasks will be actually granted with credits to honor your computers work and time. They can be viewed on several statistic pages in competition with other users and built teams.