spacetoday.net: SETI@home reaches 4 million user mark

Posted: Wed, Oct 2, 2002, 6:49 AM ET (1049 GMT)
SETI@home, a distributed computing project to analyze data obtained from a search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), now has four million users. The project, started in 1999, reached the four million user mark on October 1, according to statistics on the SETI@home web site. SETI@home users have processed 630 million "work units" of data from the Arecibo radio telescope, and have contributed over 1.1 million years of computer time. While SETI@home is ramping down the Arecibo phase of the project, it will soon provide data from a new southern hemisphere search from the Parkes telescope in Australia. SETI@home is also developing new software to search for signal pulses — of natural or artificial origin — in the data.