Is SETI@Home Dead?

I, the author, for example, had been away from SETI@Home for several years, preoccupied as I often was in-between volunteering CPU/GPU hours. I returned with revitalized zeal to see it running again (and had a spare, expendable PC turn up to dedicate once again) only to discover new blocks of data are no longer being distributed – and haven’t been for some time. Compounding the let-down confusion were numerous, prevalent SETI@Home and Berkeley center-stage pages like “Participate” and “Join” still not being updated to reflect the change to this day, 2 years after the close. I’d re-installed the client BOINC (the client portion of the platform that fueled the program for most of its days)  only to find SETI@Home not available as a program to activate with the software. Adding to the confusion was that, even 2 years later, certain, prominent webpages of the project like Participate  aren’t updated and still instruct you to go ahead. It’s easy to follow them straight from Google and miss a small notice it’s in vain.

Anyway:

The number crunching we users did for SETI@Home was a Phase I tier of the analysis, preparing it for subsequent analyses. They’ve stated that they have enough data having completed that stage for now, and subsequent stages of analysis don’t appear to be considered for crowd-souring in the same manner. Anecdotal reasons stated by general, 3rd-party media keep citing reasons like the limited bandwidth of private internet connections, but that doesn’t satisfy questions about why it was practical to dole phase 1 out to us beginning back in 28 kbps dialup days as bulk, “crude oil” data, yet 80,000 kbps is now too slow to dole the subsequent barrels of clean oil for refinement into gasoline. It all makes perfect sense on their end but the average article pokes around with anecdotes that don’t add up by themselves. Journalists repeat how internet speed is limited compared to drawing it off the archives directly in-house. Journalists repeat how the raw data was shipped physically on tapes and then disk drives from Arecibo to the US instead of trying to do it online. In the end, it appears latter-phase crunching is something they feel is more efficient to run in-house, sitting on 20 years of Phase 1 data directly, instead of doling it out all over again.

One thing they do talk about is an extremely complex and probably ever-changing set of criteria being used as filter parameters. From insane noise and interference removal processes, to potentially rectifying frequency-skewing doppler shift effects of bodies in motion, and much, much more, the latter stages of the data refinement are incomprehensibly extensive and convoluted. It’s probably too much to try to narrow down to client updates as it is constantly modified, as the science is tweaked regularly.