SETI@home

SETI@home
Screensaver with custom background
Developer(s)University of California, Berkeley
Initial releaseMay 17, 1999 (1999-05-17)
Stable releaseSETI@home v8：8.00 / December 30, 2015; 8 years ago (2015-12-30)

SETI@home v8 for NVIDIA and AMD/ATi GPU Card：8.12/
May 19, 2016; 8 years ago (2016-05-19)
AstroPulse v7：7.00/
October 7, 2014; 10 years ago (2014-10-07)

AstroPulse v7 for nVidia and AMD/ATi GPU Card：7.10/
April 23, 2015; 9 years ago (2015-04-23)
Development statusIn hibernation
Project goal(s)Discovery of radio evidence of extraterrestrial life
FundingPublic funding and private donations
Operating systemMicrosoft Windows, Linux, Android, macOS, Solaris,[1]
IBM AIX, FreeBSD, DragonflyBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, HP-UX, IRIX, Tru64 Unix, OS/2 Warp, eComStation[2]
PlatformCross-platform
TypeVolunteer computing
LicenseGPL[3]
Active usersDecrease 91,454 (March 2020)[4]
Total usersIncrease 1,803,163 (March 2020)[4]
Active hosts144,779 (March 2020)[4]
Total hosts165,178 (March 2020)[4]
Websitesetiathome.berkeley.edu

SETI@home ("SETI at home") is a project of the Berkeley SETI Research Center to analyze radio signals with the aim of searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Until March 2020, it was run as an Internet-based public volunteer computing project that employed the BOINC software platform. It is hosted by the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, and is one of many activities undertaken as part of the worldwide SETI effort.

SETI@home software was released to the public on May 17, 1999,[5][6][7][8] making it the third large-scale use of volunteer computing over the Internet for research purposes, after Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) was launched in 1996 and distributed.net in 1997. Along with MilkyWay@home and Einstein@home, it is the third major computing project of this type that has the investigation of phenomena in interstellar space as its primary purpose.

In March 2020, the project stopped sending out new work to SETI@home users, bringing the crowdsourced computing aspect of the project to a stop.[9] At the time, the team intended to shift focus onto the analysis and interpretation of the 20 years' worth of accumulated data. However, the team left open the possibility of eventually resuming volunteer computing using data from other radio telescopes, such as MeerKAT and FAST.[10]

As of November 2021, the science team has analysed the data and removed noisy signals (Radio Frequency Interference) using the Nebula tool they developed and will choose the top-scoring 100 or so multiplets to be observed using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, to which they have been granted 24 hours of observation time.[11]

  1. ^ "Choosing BOINC projects". boinc.berkeley.edu. Archived from the original on January 3, 2018. Retrieved January 3, 2023.
  2. ^ "DownloadOther – BOINC". boinc.berkeley.edu. Archived from the original on January 3, 2023. Retrieved January 3, 2023.
  3. ^ "Porting and optimizing SETI@home". setiathome.berkeley.edu. Archived from the original on January 3, 2023. Retrieved January 3, 2023.
  4. ^ a b c d "Detailed stats – SETI@Home". BOINC stats. Archived from the original on January 4, 2015. Retrieved March 5, 2020.
  5. ^ Tony Phillips (May 23, 1999). "ET, phone SETI@home!". NASA. Archived from the original on October 1, 2006. Retrieved October 6, 2006.
  6. ^ Nemiroff, R.; Bonnell, J., eds. (May 17, 1999). "How to Search for Aliens". Astronomy Picture of the Day. NASA. Retrieved October 6, 2006.
  7. ^ "SETI@home Classic: In Memoriam". December 15, 2005. Archived from the original on March 8, 2007. Retrieved October 6, 2006.
  8. ^ "Searches For ET!". Net Talk Live!. Archived from the original on August 15, 2000. Retrieved January 12, 2022.
  9. ^ Overbye, Dennis (March 23, 2020). "The Search for E.T. Goes on Hold, for Now". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on April 7, 2020. Retrieved March 23, 2020.
  10. ^ Oberhaus, Daniel (March 3, 2020). "SETI@Home Is Over. But the Search for Alien Life Continues". Wired. Archived from the original on February 28, 2021. Retrieved February 27, 2021.
  11. ^ "New zones, a milestone, and next steps". setiathome.berkeley.edu. Archived from the original on November 27, 2021. Retrieved November 27, 2021.