SETI@home has announced that they will no longer be distributing new work to clients starting on March 31st as they have enough data and want to focus on completing their back-end analysis of the data.
SETI@home is a distributed computing project where volunteers contribute their CPU resources to analyze radio data from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).
Run by the Berkeley SETI Research Center since 1999, SETI@home has been a popular project where people from all over the world have been donating their CPU resources to process small chunks of data, or "jobs", for interesting radio transmissions or anomalies. This data is then sent back to the researchers for analysis.
In an announcement posted yesterday, the project stated that they will no longer send data to SETI@home clients starting on March 31st, 2020 as they have reached a "point of diminishing returns" and have analyzed all the data that they need for now.
Instead, they want to focus on analyzing the back-end results in order to publish a scientific paper.
"It's a lot of work for us to manage the distributed processing of data. We need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results we already have, and writing this up in a scientific journal paper," their news announcement stated.
Users who wish to continue to run the SETI@home client may do so, but will not receive any new work until the project decides whether they wish to start sending work to clients again.
For those who wish to donate their CPU resources, SETI@home suggests users select another BOINC project that also supports distributed computing.
H/T Ghacks.net
Comments
xrobwx71 - 4 years ago
Sad. I used to run this on my machines back in the day, then I switched to what I thought was more pertinent, cancer research. folding@home
vsmith23 - 4 years ago
Very sad indeed! Got to crunching on this from the start, with my team,. We originally were an X-Files oriented team, then switched to Team-SciFi later on. Not many of us still crunching...I stopped for years but got back to crunching about three years ago I guess. Maybe four. Anyway, SETI@Home has always been my preferred project. I'll leave the project on my BOINC clients though Just In Case they someday decide to load the distribution queues back up :)
- "phoenix" aka "vsmith23" from Team-SciFi
arhendricks - 4 years ago
I've been running SETI@Home on work/home computers since Dec 6, 1999! I've been running it since the experiment basically started and I've completed over 26 million work units. Guess I'll have to find another project.... Bummer.
jajanes - 4 years ago
I've been running SETI@Home since July 18, 2000 - 8.51 quintillion floating point operations over the years. Sad to see it go.
alexeck - 4 years ago
This title is really misleading and is being shared on social media as "the end of SETI".