My computer is taking forever to calculate anything form BOINC.

I was thinking wouldn't it be cool if there was an appliance that I can plug to the network and all it will do will be calculate BOINC /SETI. It will be build with dedicated computational engine, something way faster then my antiquated p4. It will be nice if it could be managed from a computer via http interface the same way I manage my router.

I would not mind buying couple of these appliances and running them if they were under $100.

So SETI what do you think?

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Sure, nice idea, but SETI is not in the market to build appliances. They barely have funding to keep the project going as it is.

If there is such an applicance out there already, SETI@Home is open source, all you have to do is modify the code to work on whatever CPU architecture the appliance uses.

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an appliance that I can plug to the network

There are not that many appliances that you can plug into a network. If they need to be able to crunch as well, they're usually called network servers and desktop/laptop PCs. The dot-matrix printer won't be able to do much Seti, other than have a go at printing out the code. :-)

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If there is such an applicance out there already, SETI@Home is open source, all you have to do is modify the code to work on whatever CPU architecture the appliance uses.

they're usually called network servers and desktop/laptop PCs.

My apartment is way to small to have extra network servers and PCs running in it... If I had a house with extra rooms... well...

I was hopping someone knows and/or can recommend a number crunching appliance I can modify.

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I was hopping someone knows and/or can recommend a number crunching appliance I can modify.

The problem is most small appliances are designed for a single functionality and don't usually have much in the way of floating point power, which is needed for SETI@Home.

Cell phones have been suggested many times, but the lack of storage space and the fact that when the phone's CPU is used at max, battery life is reduced to mere minutes, making even cell phones too insignificant to use realistically.

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Eventualy is my BOINC Linux distribution (Dotsch/UX) of interest...
It's a Ubuntu based distribution for x86 and x64 (x86_64) CPUs, with the focus to crunch BOINC. It's posible to install very quickly (about 10..15 minutes) on a hard disk or on a (bootable) USB stick or setup automatilcy a diskless server for several diskless clients. The setup for the diskless server, including the hard disk installation requires about 20 minutes, the setup of a diskless client which boot over the network about 10 minutes.
It's available at http://www.dotsch.de/Dotsch_UX