SERENDIP A major, current SETI programme is Project SERENDIP, run by the University of California, Berkeley. This is a piggyback project, collecting data from an independent receiver at the Arecibo Radio Observatory (Puerto Rico, USA), and observing where ever in the sky the telescope happens to be looking whilst it carries out its normal observing programmes. SETI@home In fact though, it turns out that over a couple of years the vast majority of the sky visible to Arecibo (from ~0° to +36° declination) will be surveyed. Part of the data being collected is being split up into very small segments and distributed over the Internet to computers all over the world to be analysed in what is called SETI@home. To date, over 2,000,000 computers have run the analysis software and processed over 166 million data blocks using what is almost certainly the greatest total computing power ever applied to one problem. The current processing rate is 14 TeraFlops per second and in total 3.3 x 1020 floating-point operations have been carried out! As yet, it is far too early to say if any evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence lies within the data.