I'm a nuclear engineer and I have 5 computers in my office all to my disposal. I usually have at least one running seti@home. My newest computers fly. They do each work unit in around 3:30 minutes.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
Of course extraterrestrial life exists. The universe is too large and random for the earth to be the only planet with life on it.
I run seti because I think it's pretty cool that I can help out (even if only a bit) with some data analysis. Plus I have 2 3.0GHz machines in my office that I only use during the day (since I write and run particle transport codes, I do use 100% of the processing power all day), but I figure there's 24 hours in the day and I only work 8 of those...might as well put the computer to work the other 16 hours I'm not there.
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.