A groundbreaking project to use spare computing cycles to aid the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is going into hibernation after more than 20 years, a victim of its own success as the organisers say the project has analysed “all the data we need”.

Seti@home was founded in May 1999 by researchers at UC Berkeley, who had the idea of enlisting members of the public to help out with the computationally intensive work of processing transmissions from radio telescopes around the world. Users of early versions of the software were encouraged to run it as a screensaver so that it would not slow down their computers while they were working.

In the 20 years since, the project has logged millions of years of computing time, at its peak registering as one of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet, and inspired copycat efforts in other areas of science, including protein folding, climate prediction and the search for “amicable numbers” (any pair of numbers where the sum of the divisors of each is equal to the other).

But as the computing power has increased, the project has been throwing off more data than the academics behind it know what to do with. “We’re at the point of diminishing returns,” the organisers said in their announcement. “Basically, we’ve analysed all the data we need for now.

“It’s a lot of work for us to manage the distributed processing of data. We need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results we already have, and writing this up in a scientific journal paper.”

Seti@home is considered an unparalleled success in showing the possibility of distributed computing at scale, and its influence can be seen in everything from massively multiplayer video games to cryptocurrency projects such as bitcoin and Ethereum.

The rise of machine learning, which requires huge amounts of computing power to carry out, may give the field another boost in years to come, although privacy and security concerns limit the domains in which a distributed approach can be useful.

On its other major goal, Seti@home has been less successful: after 20 years of looking, the project has not yet found extraterrestrial intelligence.