alt Hacker NewsSETI@home: Data Acquisition and Front-End Processing (2025)
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I was just thinking about this project the other day. Seems we have a whole lot of unused compute (and now GPU). I wish someone would create a meaningful project like this to distribute AI training or something. Imagine underfunded AI researchers being able to distribute work to idle machines like SETI@home did.
This paper describes the front end of SETI@home and provides parameters for the primary data source, the Arecibo Observatory
Most of this data was recorded commensally at the Arecibo observatory over a 22 yr period
Interesting as Arecibo collapsed in December of 2020. It sounds like they have a lot of data to still churn through.
With the final analysis of this project complete, I do wonder if there's a way to bring it back with distributed agents doing the part that was so time-intensive for researchers that they had to kill it.
We used to use computing power to search for ET signals, now we mine bitcoins.
Something about SETI@home that doesn't get said enough: it didn't just do science, it created a category.
Before it, "distributed computing" meant institutional grids, cluster access, gated systems. SETI@home proved that aggregating idle cycles from millions of ordinary machines was a legitimate scientific method. That proof changed what was possible.
Folding@home came next. BOINC was built to formalize the template. Distributed citizen science became a recognized mode of doing research. None of that path was obvious before SETI@home walked it first.
What's strange is that cheap cloud compute kind of ended this era not by failing but by succeeding. Why donate your CPU when AWS is a credit card away? The economics shifted. But something got lost too — the screensaver running while you slept, the knowledge that your specific machine was doing something real in the world. That personal connection to a distributed effort hasn't really been replicated.
elicash's question is the right one. Could distributed agents revive the model? Maybe. But I suspect the hard part isn't the architecture — it's recreating the feeling that your contribution matters when it's one of ten million.
Immediate nostalgia activated. I ran this on a Pentium machine (I think) at home, still living with my parents. Sometimes I yearn for the optimism and relative naïveté of those times.