Hello Dr. Anderson, I'm not sure if you are the correct person to direct this to, but you seemed like the logical choice. We noticed that our total CPU time for Ohio University is about to move onto the top of the list and we thought we should provide some information as to how we have achieved that total. In 1999 Ohio University began installing a computer into every student dorm room. Half of the rooms were equipped the 99-00 year, and the remaining half were equipped the for the 00-01 school year. Near the end of the second year, it occurred to us that there was a lot of wasted computer time. Since we are the group of people that prepares and installs all of the software on the hard drives for those computers, as well as going in to each and every room over the summer to clean and prepare the computers for the next year, we began pre-installing the Seti@Home client on all of them. The students are free to change it if they wish, but many have chosen to leave it running. There are approximately 4500 computers, ranging from Celeron 533's to P4-1.8GHz. They all have the Seti@Home client installed, but naturally not all of them are running it anymore. If you were to graph our results, you would see unit totals rising and falling in conjunction with breaks in the school year. (We are about to go into winter break so our totals will drop off dramatically until January, when the students return.) In order to consolidate the traffic on our end a bit, we are using a SetiQueue server from http://www.setiqueue.org. With the Seti@Home project winding down, we are looking forward to the new project. Of course, it will be the start of the 03-04 school year before we can really begin processing any measurable data blocks. As for the current project, we may or may not achieve the highest total data blocks before the end (currently, we are ranked 5th), but it will be an honor to have donated the most computer time. ==Ron Williams Ohio University Communication Network Services

And a follow-up addendum:

It was the story about the cheaters that prompted me to want to write the letter about how we've gotten where we are. When we first saw people turning in 15,000+ blocks a day, we were wondering how they were doing it, too. I can't imagine that there are too many people that have access to over 4000 computers like we do, and we only get 4,000 ~ 6,000 at best. So, when we saw all these people moving up the charts that fast, we wondered what they running for computers, and just how many of them they were using. It never occured to us that they might be turning in false numbers. I still can't quite fathom the motivation behind it. It's not like there's a prize for the winner - or even a "winner" per say. The real prize would be if you turned in a block that actually had a verifiable signal. False data could never give that to you. ==Ron Williams Ohio University Communication Network Services