The SETI@home screen saver is a dynamic picture of the number-crunching taking place behind the scenes, including frequency analysis and a search for pulses and repeats. Over the past 10 years, SETI@home participants have contributed 3 million years of computing time, the largest computation that’s ever been done on this planet.
BERKELEY — The world's largest and longest-running volunteer computing project, SETI@home, celebrates its tenth anniversary this month with 140,000 participants and 235,000 computers powering the search for intelligent signals from space. The SETI@home screen saver is a dynamic picture of the number-crunching taking place behind the scenes, including frequency analysis and a search for pulses and repeats. Over the past 10 years, SETI@home participants have contributed 3 million years of computing time, the largest computation that's ever been done on this planet. No extraterrestrials have been found yet. But the project will hold a day-long symposium at the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory on May 21 to celebrate the birthday and discuss the future of a project that still excites the public and has spurred the development of dozens of similar volunteer distributed computing projects. Launched May 17, 1999, SETI@home uses home computers to sift through radio data acquired from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico in search of patterns that might indicate an intelligent source. The at-home Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) quickly attracted a worldwide following: Three months after its debut, 1 million people had signed up in 223 countries, running the screensaver software on home and work computers and in grade school classrooms, universities and even government offices.
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