In 1998, the private Celera Corporation started a parallel sequencing project that was able to proceed more quickly and at a lower cost than the public project because it made use of the data that the academic consortium had made openly available. Researchers in the consortium became nervous that if Celera was able to complete the sequencing project first, it would patent the results and restrict the redistribution and scientific use of the data. In May of 2000, Jim Kent, a biology graduate student at UC Santa Cruz who had a background as a computer programmer, approached Computer Science Professor David Haussler and offered to write an assembly program using a sampler strategy. Haussler had rigged together a makeshift supercomputer out of 100 Dell Pentium III processor workstations for the genome project, but Celera was working with one of the most powerful computer systems available at the time, and their chances looked grim. Desperate to try anything that might allow academics to keep the genomic data open-source, Haussler gave Kent the go-ahead. In what has been described by other scientists as an almost miraculous feat, Kent took less than a month to write a program, GigAssembler, that allowed the Human Genome Project to assemble and publish the first human genome sequence on June 22, 2000, just a few days before Celera completed theirs.