SETI@home: A million CPU years and still no ETs

David P. Anderson, University of California

SETI@home records data at the Arecibo radio observatory, distributes it through the Internet, and analyzes it using a screensaver program, searching for signs of extraterrestrial life. In our first year of operation we analyzed 15 Terabytes of data using 400,000 years of computer time. Over 2.5 million people in 226 countries have participated. SETI@home is the largest computation ever performed, is the first major scientific experiment with large-scale public participation, and serves as a prototype for future distributed-computing projects.