Posted by Davin Flateau on 27 May 2005 at 2:55 pm.
Filed under Astronomy.
When you’re done using your computer, what does it do? If you’re like most people, your computer probably does nothing - you either turn it off, or leave it idling. If you think about it, your computer probably spends most of its life twiddling its silicon thumbs. Even when you’re browsing the web or typing a letter, most of your computer’s vast processing power isn’t being used. I’ve heard the occasional fustrated sigh coming from desktop boxes, while laptops literally open up and yawn at the pitiful tasks we have them doing most of the time.
Now imagine if you could take all the spare processing power your computer has, and multiply it by the millions of other idle computers in the world. You’d get the world’s most powerful computer!
The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, or BOINC, is a program that lets you use your spare computer time to search for ET signals (SETI@Home), scour the galaxy for gravitational waves from pulsars (Einstein@Home), help build a better particle accelerator (LHC@ Home), and other useful science problems that would normally take a single computer centuries to finish. Think of it as a screensaver that can advance the knowledge of mankind!
You can download the program for Windows, Mac and Linux, and configure it to act like a screensaver, or run silently in the background. Stars Over Kansas has a SETI@Home team and Einstein@Home team, so be sure to combine your work with all of ours! Remember, only YOU can stop computer boredom.
