BOINC at Berkeley: The future of distributed computing

Perhaps you’ve heard of SETI@home, or perhaps not. SETI@home is a project where you load a screensaver on your machine, and it downloads data from the SETI project at UC-Berkeley. Then spare cycles on your computer can be used to crunch the data. It’s what is called a distributed computing project whereby hundreds of thousands of volunteers use their computers to compute scientific data. It’s a great thing, and today I wanted to point out that SETI@home is now part of BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing.

Now there are a whole variety of projects you can work on such as Rosetta@home to help researchers develop cures for human diseases or Climateprediction.net to study climate change. All you have to do is download the client software, and submit your email address. It’s a great way to help scientific research, all from the comfort of your home.

The software can run all the time, if you want, and it just uses spare computing cycles. Or you can set it up as a screensaver so that when your computer is completely idle it does it’s processing. Check out the BOINC homepage and see all the different projects that you can assist in their computing.