SETI: Managing 4.7 million Computers With Six People

Roland Piquepaille says:

It's a well-known fact that the SETI@home distributed computing program is the largest grid computing effort in the world, with 4.7 million computing nodes. But do you know how many people work to maintain this network? The SETI team manages 0.1 percent of the world's total computing capacity with only six programmers and system administrators, according to this interview with David Anderson, the project leader for the SETI@home program, by Astrobiology Magazine. In other words, each member of the team is handling about 800,000 PCs. Impressive, isn't? This summary contains some excerpts from this interview about the history of the project or why users were attracted to the project for social reasons more than for technical ones.

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