Today marks a sad day in a long journey of my old SETI@Home account. For years now I’ve been using SETI@Home as a screensaver under a very old e-mail address (because SETI@Home didn’t allow for an account to change e-mail addresses). That old account scoured over 330 data units totaling 12,720 hours of CPU time (1.45 years of work). I’ve never detected a “spike” but it was still a semi-impressive number.

It’s a sad day for me at least because SETI@Home has started the transition over to BOINC. BOINC is the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing and “is a software platform for distributed computing using volunteer computer resources.”

For whatever reason SETI@Home has lost my account data (so I might have found ET but I would never be given credit) so to use BOINC I couldn’t transition over I have to start over. This is no big deal because I need to update the e-mail address with SETI@Home anyway. But I won’t be seeing big numbers anymore and big numbers are what I’m used to seeing.

BOINC is nicer than the old SETI@Home system for numerous reasons and I look forward to using BOINC more in the future.