Seti@home enlisted people’s computers to aid search for extraterrestrial intelligence
A groundbreaking project to use spare computing cycles to aid the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is going into hibernation after more than 20 years, a victim of its own success as the organisers say the project has analysed “all the data we need”.
Seti@home was founded in May 1999 by researchers at UC Berkeley, who had the idea of enlisting members of the public to help out with the computationally intensive work of processing transmissions from radio telescopes around the world. Users of early versions of the software were encouraged to run it as a screensaver so that it would not slow down their computers while they were working.
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