SETI@Home Project Ends-( but will evolve thankfully)

For years, volunteers shared idle CPU cycles to analyze interstellar data.

Phil Hochmuth, Network World
Friday, December 16, 2005
Along with the Howard Stern Show, another radio endeavor involving alien life forms is going off the air this week; SETI@Home, a grid supercomputer project for detecting signs of extra terrestrial life from deep space, officially ended December 15.


"We'll be shutting down the "SETI@home Classic" project on December 15," read an e-mail sent by SETI@Home administrators at the University of California at Berkeley, where the project started in 1999. "The workunit totals of users and teams will be frozen at that point, and the final totals will be available on the Web."

The Search for Extra Terrestrial Life at Home (SETI@Home) project harness idle CPU cycles from millions of Internet-connected PCs across the globe in order to analyze data collected from massive radio telescopes. Running in place of a screensaver, the SETI@Home software, when downloaded on a PC, collected raw data from a centralized SETI@Home server bank and searched for patterns that might signal intelligent life--possible E.T., TV shows, radio communications, or other signals. Other Applications
Although the program ran as a screensaver the collective computing power was enormous; 2 million years of accumulated CPU time, and over 50 terabytes of data, or "workunits," parsed. More than 5 million users have downloaded the software, according to the project organizers.>>>>snip

But like the Stern show, SETI@Home will live on in another form. The project is being moved to the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), an open-source grid project using the same principles as the original 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.>>>snip


http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,123949,00.asp


I used this in classes for an understanding of science research.