Many important scientific research projects require enormous amounts of computing power. Whether it’s modeling weather or climate, detecting gravitational waves from neutron stars or coded messages from extraterrestrials, or studying the evolution of the Milky Way or the whole universe, researchers need all the computing clout they can get.
Now, anyone can help provide that computer power, for free, from home, with a few clicks of a mouse.
Supercomputers vs. Distributed Computing
Many well-funded research projects own or buy time on state-of-the-art supercomputers, the speediest of which can perform more than a million billion calculation - a teraflop - per second. Many worthy projects, however, lack the funds to access these mega-machines. A solution that more and more researchers have found is to recruit volunteers who let their desktops, laptops or even PlayStations pitch in when they would otherwise be idle.
By breaking computations into many small pieces that do not have to be run at the same time and distributing those calculations to thousands or even hundreds of thousands of home or office computers, researchers can get all the benefits of a virtual supercomputer for free. This approach to computing is called network or distributed computing.
The idea started in 1995 with SETI@HOME, which taps hundreds or thousands of volunteer computers to sift through radio telescope data for possible signals from advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. SETI@HOME has been a great success, and dozens of research projects worldwide have followed suit.
BOINC Provides the Perfect Portal
BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, is an umbrella organization that links research projects with volunteers through an easy-to-use portal.
As this story was being written, 314,326 volunteers were linked to the BOINC network, with 565,310 computers on the network. The combined computing power that produced was 5.5 petaflops, which means that BOINC was running twice as fast as the world’s fastest supercomputer, the Cray XT5 Jaguar at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. That’s pretty impressive for a group of volunteers!
BOINC offers volunteers a variety of choices. One can join as an individual or, to add to the fun, join an existing group or create one's own. Volunteers can choose one project that catches their eye, or download several; BOINC will make sure that each one gets its fair share of a networked computer’s spare time.
SETI at HOME, EINSTEIN at HOME, LHC at HOME—and Dozens More
Within a few minutes of navigating to the BOINC homepage, a volunteer can download the software to run any of the 36 research projects BOINC supports. Then, the next time that person steps away from the computer, it can be helping CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the LHC, determine stable orbits for the particles it’s smashing together (LHC at HOME), detecting gravitational waves from neutron stars (Einstein at HOME), figuring out how to stop the spread of malaria (Malariacontrol.net), studying the structure and function of proteins (Rosetta at HOME) or perhaps sifting through giant haystacks of radio telescope data to find the glimmering needle of a message from ET (SETI at HOME).
Most volunteers comment on the good feeling they get when they walk by their computer when it would otherwise be doing nothing useful and see one of the colorful displays that tells them what project they're helping and how much support they've provided so far.
Why not join the fun and turn one more computer’s idle moments into a real contribution to science?
Robert Adler - Robert Adler is a science and technology reporter and book author. He divides his time between Santa Rosa, California and Oaxaca, ...
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