bk99.de entertain the web since 1997

bk99.de
UC Berkeley · AICurated

SETI@home: millions of computers search for extraterrestrials

Summary

On 17 May 1999 the University of California, Berkeley launched SETI@home, a program with which volunteers donated their PCs’ idle computing time to analyse radio telescope data. The project searched for signals from extraterrestrial intelligence and became the best-known example of volunteer distributed computing. On 31 March 2020 it stopped distributing new work, without having found aliens, but with a model that many research projects adopted.

How it worked

Participants installed a screensaver that downloaded small packets of radio telescope data, searched them for unusual signals and sent the result back. Without a supercomputer of its own, the project gained computing power that hardly any university had at the time, and hundreds of thousands of people worldwide took part in a research project.

SETI@home gave rise to the BOINC platform, on which many other projects later ran, for example in protein research or climate modelling. In March 2020 SETI@home went into hibernation: according to the operators, further data hardly yielded new insights, and managing the distributed work was laborious.

Ideas

  • The idle computing time of many machines adds up to a supercomputer.
  • Science can involve volunteers directly.
  • A screensaver made a research project visible.
  • A good platform outlives the project it was built for.

Insights

  • SETI@home proved that distributed computing over the open internet works, long before cloud services sold computing power on demand.
  • Finding nothing is also a result: it narrows down where and how strong signals are not.

Facts

  • Launched on 17 May 1999 at the University of California, Berkeley.
  • On 31 March 2020 the distribution of new work to volunteers ended.
  • The project gave rise to the BOINC platform.

References

Remarks

  • The project page now states that SETI@home is in hibernation and no longer distributes tasks.

Recommendations

  • If you want to donate computing time, you can find active projects via BOINC or Science United.
  • For your own distributed systems, plan for the administrative effort that SETI@home also struggled with in the end.

View the project page

Search the Web Archive

Black Forest Labs · 2026

FLUX 3 Image Klein: what lies behind “5.6B parameters” and “8 GB”

With FLUX 3 Image Klein, Black Forest Labs has released an open image model with 5.6 billion parameters that generates images, edits them with up to ten reference images and places image elements via bounding boxes. According to the vendor, it runs with INT8 on graphics cards with as little as 8 GB and beats larger open models in internal comparisons. This post explains the technology and shows what the mandatory separate prompt upsampler, the memory figures and the first community experiences mean for running it on your own hardware.

Own project · 2026

An AI book for my birthday: cordless drill instead of screwdriver

For my birthday I was given a book designed by an AI, with my photo on the cover and the title “Die Matrix ruft – Peter antwortet später” (“The Matrix is calling – Peter will answer later”). You might think an AI gift is impersonal, but the personal part lies in the idea, the photo and the punchline, not in setting the letters. This post explains why I see AI as a cordless drill and where the comparison still falls short.

Own project · 2026

125 billion parameters on a 12 GB graphics card: what Strata does differently

Strata brings Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, a language model with 125 billion parameters, to an ordinary gaming PC with 12 GB of graphics memory and 32 to 64 GB of RAM. Version 0.1.39 was released on 4 October 2026 for the project, which has only been public since 24 September and already had around 11,000 stars on GitHub on 5 October. This article explains what Strata is, how it works technically, what you need it for and where its limits are.