Seti@home has a fond place in my heart. It has been run by the Berkeley SETI Research Center since 1999, and I think I installed it on my machine sometime around Dec 1999 or early 2000 after hearing about it from one of the News websites (possibly Slashdot). Once I had it running on my system I was pushing to get it installed on all the computers in the University computer lab as they were running 24/7 and I saw that as a wasted opportunity for furthering search for ET. I ran it constantly on my computers till about 2009 post which I switched to running Folding@home which is more focused on Science / DNA sequencing / Medical research. Seti was one of the first Distributed computing systems that I know of and the amount of data processed by computers under its umbrella is staggering.
On March 31, the project will stop sending out new work units to users and the project will instead start focusing on analyzing all the blips identified by volunteers’ machines which could be potential evidence of aliens with an eye on publishing a research paper. Once this is completed they might start pushing out work packages again but that will be a while before it happens.
“It’s a lot of work for us to manage the distributed processing of data. We need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results we already have, and writing this up in a scientific journal paper,” their news announcement stated.
Looking forward to reading the research paper and conclusions generated by the Seti@home program.
Source: SETI@home Search for Alien Life Project Shuts Down After 21 Years
– Suramya