Two-decade old SETI@home project going down at the end of the month

Backed by the University of California, Berkeley, SETI@home is a public volunteer computing project that uses the BOINC software platform and that started its search for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence back in mid-May 1999. In the two decades that have passed, this project failed to deliver any groundbreaking discovery and SETI@home users will no longer get new work starting on March 31, 2020.

For those who are new to SETI@home, it's enough to say that this project involves many home users that contribute their CPU and/or GPU resources to analyze the massive amounts of radio data generated by the Arecibo radio telescope (Puerto Rico) and the Green Bank Telescope (West Virginia) to detect any signs of extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). 

According to the team behind the project, SETI@home goes into hibernation for two main reasons: all the data needed at this point has been already analyzed and now they need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the existing results. 

SETI@home fans should relax because the project is not going away. The website and the message boards will stay online and it is very likely that the computing capabilities of the platform will — sooner or later — be used in new SETI or cosmology/pulsar research efforts.

Right now, there is also a rather large list of BOINC-driven computing projects that can be found on this page. As usual, the comments section is all yours, so feel free to share your thoughts on distributed computing projects like SETI@home.