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SETI@home ("SETI at home") is an Internet-based public volunteer computing project

The two original goals of SETI@home were: to do useful scientific work by supporting an observational analysis to detect intelligent life outside Earth, and to prove the viability and practicality of the 'volunteer computing' concept.

With over 5.2 million participants worldwide, the project is the distributed computing project with the most participants to date. The original intent of SETI@home was to utilize 50,000-100,000 home computers.[11] Since its launch on May 17, 1999, the project has logged over two million years of aggregate computing time[when?]. On September 26, 2001, SETI@home had performed a total of 1021 floating point operations. It is acknowledged by the Guinness World Records as the largest computation in history.[18] With over 278,832 active computers in the system (2.4 million total) in 234 countries, as of November 14, 2009, SETI@home has the ability to compute over 769 teraFLOPS.[19] For comparison, the K computer, which as of June 20, 2011 was the world's fastest supercomputer, achieved 8.162 petaFLOPS.