This article suffers from a bad vocabulary collision. Distributed computing existed long before SETI@home, and will continue to exist as long as there isn’t just one computer doing everything.<p>“Volunteer computing” is probably a better way to refer to this phenomenon.
My personal opinion a central reason for the fading of volunteer-based distributed scientific computing (such as the mentioned SETI@home) is the rise of laptops.<p>Normal desktop PCs (in particular the ones that one builds by oneself for gaming) have sufficient cooling capacity that it is causes no serious issue to let them run to help some interesting science projects while you are at work. If you use a laptop, this is much more inconvenient since the cooling design of laptops is nearly always a compromise, and they are typically rather not built to run many hours of "numbercrunching" on most days for months.<p>EDIT: the article also at least as a sideline mentions this fact: "Making matters worse, fewer people have this hardware due to the general shift from desktop computers to laptops."
It's not dead. We just call it cloud computing now. After all what is a Kubernetes auto scaling solution if not distributed? Lambda/serverless compute even more so.<p>Also, in the heyday of Seti@home, computers were usually left on and didn't use a whole lot less power when idle because power management was far less advanced than it is now. Intel power states and gating were only just in their infancy. CPUs ran at fixed clock rates. And energy was cheap. So people didn't care.<p>These days it costs real money because idle time is much cheaper than heavy loaded time, and it's better spent financially donated to the organisations needing the compute and spent on cloud computing where they can manage the workload directly.
I didn't see any mention of cryptocurrency mining in the article.<p>At one point, people would throw their personal <i>and employer's</i> computers at one of the volunteer projects (SETI, Folding, various hash/key cracking) because that was a cool thing to do.<p>Some early Bitcoin mining was done for similar reasons.<p>Then cryptocurrency started to be worth money, and mining pools attracted a whole lot of other people to this 'distributed computing', and also attracted at least some of the people previously contributing to altruistic volunteer compute projects.<p>Somewhere in there, maybe because of mining awareness, it became less acceptable to run non-business things on employer's idle computers, so that's a lot more computers removed from the pool.
A pretty large nit: "Twenty-one years later, SETI@home shut down, having found nothing. An incalculable amount of PC cycles and electricity wasted for nothing."<p>Negative results are still results. What SETI@Home showed was that <i>after analysing all available data exhaustively</i> that there was in fact no clear sign of alien intelligence to be found. That's a different state of knowledge than simply <i>assuming</i> the same result without examination of data.<p>It's a result that's disappointing to some, no doubt. It is still, however, a net increment in the amount of human knowledge.
>Distributed computing erupted onto the scene in 1999 with the release of SETI@home, a nifty program and screensaver (back when people still used those) that sifted through radio telescope signals for signs of alien life.<p>Distributed computing erupted onto the scene in the early 80s when microprocessors became mainstream.
The marginal cost of using spare capacity in home computers has risen significantly. It used to be the case that CPUs pretty much always used the same amount of power regardless of load, so filling those unused cycles with SETI@home et al. was essentially free. Now, whether the CPU is idling or running full bore makes a significant difference both in energy usage and in noise development. I would not want my desktop's fans to drone away while I'm trying to work.
The economy works because there's specialization and different products. Thus I can trade product A for product B and both me and the person I traded with actually gain something we didn't have before.<p>The problem with distributed computing is that there's no specialization. My compute is the same as your compute. There's no way where I can trade compute where we both benefit.<p>So in the end, even crypto won't really work either. You basically have to print tokens for crypto to work and that's essentially the same as giving you a piece of paper and calling it a dollar as payment.
It is neither dying nor fading into the background. Huge numbers of scientific endeavours (eg LIGO) depend on distributed computing. Much of the world of finance depends on massive risk models computed using distributed computing. The LLMs driving the AI hype cycle are for sure not trained and finetuned on single machines etc.<p>A very specific old model of distributed computing isn't as popular as it once was because the world of technology has changed beyond all recognition since the likes of SETI@Home etc.