https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/59kdwn/cryptocurrency-miners-are-limiting-the-search-for-alien-life-now-gpu-seti

Everyday thousands of volunteers turn the power of their computers over to the SETI@home project in hopes of finding aliens among the stars. SETI@home—short for “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at Home”—is an experiment that uses people’s computers to increase the project’s processing power and analyze more radio signals from outer space.

The UC Berkeley-based SETI project only relies on volunteers for a portion of its computing power, however, and has its own computing installations at several telescopes. But the project team ran into problems recently when it tried to expand its operations by adding the latest and most powerful computers to two observatories. The team discovered, Berkeley SETI Research Center chief scientist Dan Werthimer told the BBC, that it couldn’t find the key computer component it needed: graphics processing units (GPUs).