Aha, well that is cool, I was wondering how SETI worked. So, with threading then, we talked before I believe about the advantages it provided. Say I wanted to thread a job on my machine, does it gain any speed if I'm on a single processor? I believe you told me it wouldn't, but I was thinking in terms of say I was transfering a file, and I made multiple threads to support multiple connections to the file in the hopes of maximizing my bandwidth usage to get the file. Is this reasonable? Or is the speed increase negligable?
What about how they do those distributed attacks of an encryption algorithm? You know what I'm talking about here? They get those large groups of people all over then have some sort of controlling program that tells each machine what key to try... sort of like distributed computing... is this done with threads, or message passing like you mentioned?
Sorry, I'm a n00b in this area.