SETI@home is about to shut down after 21 years of operation

SETI@home is a project where volunteers can donate their computing resources to analysing radio data from sources like the Arecibo radio telescope and the Green Bank Telescope, with the hope of finding Signs of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). 

The researchers over at Berkeley have concluded that their project has reached the “point of diminishing returns”. Right now, the project has all of the data it needs, and the SETI@home team must refocus its efforts on back-end analysis of the information they have. This data will become the focus of future scientific papers. 

On March 31st, the SETI@home team will stop distributing new work for its volunteers. After SETI@home’s distributed computing efforts end, the team behind the project recommends that their contributors move to other BOINC-based distributed computing projects. SETI@home contributors should also consider distributed computing projects like Folding@home, which is dedicated to disease research. 

SETI@home has been operating since 1999 and has an active community of contributors across the globe. For now, the SETI@home website and message boards will remain active, but at this time it is unknown if the SETI@home project will ever be continued with a focus on new areas of cosmology research. For now, SETI@home is in “hibernation”, but without any future plans, the distributed computing project is finished in a practical sense.