NB: This page is now obsolete. It was first drafted late May, 1999 - six and a half years ago.
On December 15, 2005 the SETI@home project (in its original form) issued it's last work unit. 36 hours later, at around midnight December 17 it closed the door on processed results from those clients still operating.
The SETI@home project came out of beta testing about a week ago (at the time of writing). Jeremy Morley, a reader of uk.media.tv.sf.babylon5 (and "a lecturer at one of our finest institutions") brought this to the attention of the newsgroup on May 17th with the following posting:
From: -- address obscured -- (Jeremy Morley)
Date: Mon, 17 May 1999 22:05:00 +0100
Subject: Discover the Centauri...
Thought I'd point y'all at -the- coolest screensaver ever! And no, this
ain't a commercial plug.
SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Life, listen to various bits of
the sky for incoming radio signals. These need to be signal processed
to try to extract candidate patterns that might just be extraterrestrial
signals. Unfortunately, it's a big job :-( So, the plan is to
distribute the processing amongst many machines.
Fine so far.
The idea though is to use as many PCs/Macs/UNIX boxes as possible that
are connected to the Internet, and to use spare CPU cycles by writing
small "screensaver" apps that will download short chunks of the radio
data to process. On a modem connection, the app will only connect when
you allow it. The data chunks are 300-400K in size and the app itself
is only a few hundred K too to download.
The project is called "SETI at Home".
If you're interested in joining in, and chancing the 1 to billions odds,
you might just end up being the one to discover the Centauri.. ;-)
More details at the dedicated Web site:
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu
Hope this is of interest. Way cool use of spare processing power, if you
ask me! :-)
In the space of a week it became clear that a number of people on the newsgroup had taken up with the project, so when on 22 May the project announced the creation of teams, it seem reasonable to create a team for anyone on the group wanting to fly the flag.
Find the up-to-the-minute team stats at and browse recent daily standings in these snapshots.
If you want to look at recent comparative team performances, then there's also Lars Haugseth's most active crunchers page.
There's also a regularly updated progress page for mobile users at http://www.rijhwani.org/~raj/b5seti/stats.wml.
Regrettably, e-mail purporting to be from sites giving away free (or free trial) accounts (such as Hotmail, Bigfoot or AOL) will be automatically refused delivery. On balance e-mail from such sites received here is over-whelmingly junkmail.