Starting in the late 1950s, researchers have been performing progressively more sensitive searches for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, but each search has been limited by the technologies available at the time. As radio frequency technologies have became more efficient and computers have become faster, the searches have grown larger and more sensitive, The SETI@home project, managed by a group of researchers at the Space Sciences Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, is the first attempt to use large-scale distributed computing to perform a sensitive search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.