The SETI@home project is running out of radio-telescope data. S@H passively collects radio-telescope data in bulk by piggybacking on more mainstream radio astronomy projects. When the project started, they had so much data that it appeared that it would take thousands of years and millions of dollars to sift through it all and look for telltales that might indicate distant intelligence. Facing budget-cuts that would have severely limited their number-crunching capacity, the project’s leaders opted instead to produce one of the world’s first ad-hoc distributed computational projects, writing software that you and I could run on our desktops, software that would download pieces of raw data and do the bulk of the required computation on it. The project has been such a huge success that they’re in danger of exhausting their data, and still people sign up to give their idle computing time to the project. Now they’re increasing their data-set twentyfold — how long do you think it’ll hold out? Link Discuss