Distributed Computing is an increasingly popular application for screensavers to activate a useful background task and participate in so called distributed computing applications, like different science projects. This is convenient because these applications only use resources when the computer would be otherwise idle. This form of screensaver takes advantage of
your computer’s inactivity to process data from another source.

Nowadays there are many websites dedicated to distributed computing online projects. For example here http://distributedcomputing.info/you may find information about active and upcoming projects One of such projects is SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence) SETI@home http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ project, developed to search for extra-terrestrial radio signals.

This screensaver displays a graph of the radio spectrum and processes radio signal information received from SETI servers. The screensaver sends back results on the data processed. By using so many computers, SETI greatly reduces the amount of time it takes to process
all the signals received from its radio telescope.

To see a screensaver from SETI, please visit: http://seticlassic.ssl.berkeley.edu/screensaver/index.html or my website home page http://www.newfreescreensavers.com/

Cosmic noise, which is written in the Arecibo radio telescope is divided into small units and sent to computers of participants to search their signals with special characteristics - those that may have an artificial extraterrestrial origin.
If the project will detect the signal, participants whose computers were engaged in the processing units containing a signal, will be entered the list of sponsors for all subsequent scientific publications.
If you want to help to Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, you may join this project and have fun!