CNET:

After March 31, a bunch of amateur alien hunters will regain some personal computing power. The Berkeley SETI Research Center announced Monday that SETI@home, the two-decades-old crowdsourcing effort to hunt for signs of E.T. in radio telescope data using internet-connected computers, is shutting down at the end of the month.

The home-based search for extraterrestrial intelligence project was launched from University of California, Berkeley, back in 1999 — when the internet was still a relatively new thing to many people and the term crowdsourcing had not yet been coined.

SETI@home works a little bit like bitcoin mining: Volunteers install a free computer program that downloads and crunches data in the background around the clock. The difference being that there is no currency produced as a reward, except for the satisfaction of helping your fellow humans navigate the vast cosmos, in a way.

Now the SETI@home team says it’s time to shut the whole thing down and focus on compiling the results from the project.

In the early days of the internet, I was more than happy to lend my “extra” computing power to this project.