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michael_cooney
Senior Editor

SETI@Home shuts down

Opinion
Dec 16, 20051 min
Data Center

What are nerds gonna do for a screensaver now that SETI@Home is no more? (Ed.– Guess it’s back to 7 of 9.)

So, yeah, SETI@Home closed for business yesterday, which is a bummer as it was the first well-known grassroots grid computing effort in its bid to find E.T. Since its debut in 1999, 2 million years of accumulated CPU time and over 50TB of data were parsed. More than 5 million users have downloaded the software, frustrating net admins worldwide. Heh, heh.

Our colleague Phil reports the project will live on, but is moving to the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), an open-source grid project.

“BOINC will continue the search for E.T. radio signals, but a new client also allows users to devote spare CPU power for other research projects, such as climate change, astronomy and curing human diseases.”

Um, should diseases be #1?