Going BOINC-ers

As hard as it may seem to believe there are still a few of us that can remember a world in which there were no personal computers and the Internet was called the "DARPANET (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Network)." DARPANET, although initially conceived as a program that would allow the US Air Force to communicate with its network of bomber and missile bases following a nuclear war, the technology quickly evolved into a system that enabled the sharing of information between academic and commercial research centers. It goes without saying that the Internet now bears absolutely no resemblance to its ancestor.

Fortunately, there are now many programs available that allow you, and your computer, to participate in ongoing research projects devoted to combating AIDS, predicting the long term consequences of global warming, or high energy physics research.

Welcome to the world of Distributed Computing!

The distributedcomputing.info web site defines Distributed Computing as "... a science which solves a large problem by giving small parts of the problem to many computers to solve and then combining the solutions for the parts into a solution for the problem."

In practice, this means 1) taking a very complex problem or dataset, 2) breaking it into much smaller, well-defined sections, 3) sending the smaller packages to be analyzed by the volunteer's home computer, and 4) transferring the processed data back to its source.

At present the majority of Distributed Computing projects use the BerkeleyOpen Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) software which was developed at, and is maintained by, the University of California at Berkeley.

(NOTE: I have BOINC installed on my home computer and I can assure you that it is easy to download and install. Additionally, I have not noticed any decrease in performance in my web browser or in Microsoft Office 2003 while BOINC is running "in the background.")