[email protected]—massively distributed computing for SETI

AbstractSince radio's earliest days, people have considered the possibility of detecting signals from an extraterrestrial civilization-and since the advent of radio astronomy, the tools to perform such a search have existed. Starting in the late 1950s, researchers have been performing progressively more sensitive searches, but each search has been limited by the technologies available at the time. As radio frequency technologies have become more efficient and computers have become faster, the searches have grown larger and more sensitive. The [email protected] project, managed by a group of researchers at the Space Sciences Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, is the first attempt to use large-scale distributed computing to perform a sensitive search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.