Donate Your Unused Computer Power to Science

Chances are you're reading this article on a computer. And unless you're constantly designing spaceships and listening to one of a million songs squirreled away on your hard drive, you've got some data-crunching and storage capacity to spare. Why not donate it to scientific research by participating in a volunteer computing project?

Huh? What is volunteer computing?
Think of volunteer computing as a donation to science, but instead of money or a body part, you’re sharing your computer's unused power to help find life on other planets, cure cancer or predict the effects of global warming. These large scientific problems are split up into small pieces that are worked on by individual computers around the world.

The technology is a type of distributed computing, which uses multiple machines across a network to do a particular computation, but because these science projects rely on anonymous donors, "volunteer" gives it distinction, says David Anderson, founder of BOINC—the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing—a group at the University of California that develops widely used volunteer computing software.

Why do scientists need my computer?
There are half a billion personal computers in the world with processors that do nothing most of the time, explains Anderson, who also directs the popular SETI@home project, which uses volunteers to help analyze radio waves from space for signs of extraterrestrials.

The combined strength of a tiny fraction of this unused computing power is greater than that of the world's largest supercomputer, allowing scientists to attempt problems they'd otherwise never crack.

For example, chemistry professor Vijay Pande at Stanford University has access to 300,000 computer processors for his Folding@home project, which studies how proteins assemble themselves, for insight into such diseases as Alzheimer's, mad cow, Parkinson's and cancer. The typical supercomputer has about 5,000 processors, he says.

What’s in it for me?
A virtual pat on the back or a warm fuzzy for helping scientists do good research motivates most people to participate in volunteer computing projects.

"They don't get any money," Anderson says.

Rather, people join because they want to support one of the projects. Some people are fascinated by the possibility of finding ET or deem global warming the most important issue of our time. Many want to help cure terminal illnesses.

"Others enjoy the competitive nature of it, as one competes to see who can calculate the most," Pande commented in an e-mail.

How does it work?
Participants download to their computers special software that fetches work units over the Internet. The volunteer computers do their individual task and, once complete, send the piece back to a central server. If they want, they can pick up another unit.

"One of the jobs this piece of software has is to make that happen invisibly to the user," Anderson says.

People who use their computers primarily to surf the Web, check e-mail or do word processing will never notice the program running. However, the software also can be configured to run only when the computer is idle—at night, for example, or when a screen saver kicks in.

In addition, most programs provide users with the option to monitor their projects. For example, participants in the University of Oxford's Climateprediction.net experiment can watch the climate change on a 3-D planet Earth as the program models the potential effects of global warming.

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