Scientific Progress Goes BOINC

Since sometime in 1998, my primary screensaver has been the SETI@home client. The system was designed by UC Berkeley as a means of harnessing massive amounts of computer power with a minimal amount of financial investment.

The SETI@home project was developed around two premises:

1. People are fascinated with the potential existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe;
2. Large work projects can be divided into small "packets" that can be downloaded over the internet and processed while the computer is not being used.
   

The idea was brilliant, and hugely successful. The amount of work that SETI chews through in a single day surpasses all the supercomputing work done in major research establishments by a factor of thousands. The success of the project has allowed numerous rewrites of the code, allowing the project to analyze the data much more thoroughly.

Recently, SETI@home began migrating their client to a new project called BOINC, which is a new architecture that allows your computer to participate in a variety of supercomputing endeavors:

1. ClimatePrediction.net - Study climate change;
   
2. Einstein@home - Search for gravitational signals coming from pulsars;
3. LHC@home - Improve the design of the CERN LHC particle accelerator;
4. Predictor@home - Investigate protein-related diseases;
5. SETI@home - Search for radio evidence of extraterrestrial life;

And the list is growing. The power of BOINC is not only allowing the individual user to choose what scientific endeavors he wishes to participate in, but the architecture allows almost any scientific research project to be hosted via the BOINC portal. This could likely be a potential alternative to those researchers who have computationally-intensive research, but their budget does not allow the purchase, rental, or development of a supercomputer.

Turning the world-wide web into a supercomputer is one of the most brilliant ideas conceived in computing history. There are likely millions of desktop computers sitting idly as you read this. All those processors could be put to good use.

I discovered the BOINC client last week after upgrading my computer to OSX Tiger. My computer refused to launch the SETI@home client while I was away from my computer. So due to my operating system upgrade, I was also forced to upgrade to BOINC. So far, it looks like it's becoming a smart choice.