SETI@home is one of the original peer-to-peer success stories, using the idle times of millions of private computers to crunch data looking for alien signals in radio waves from space. The application that enables this virtual supercomputer has gotten a high tech upgrade by moving to the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform. This new platform helps simplify the process for creating and managing distributed computing projects like SETI@home. This allows a participant to participate in multiple projects and may help protect against fraudulent data being sent back to project servers.

The screensaver feature of SETI@home also gets an upgrade. The original two-dimensional window that included work unit information along with an animation of the work unit in progress now floats as a 3D object against an animated star field.