If you’re using your home-computer at the moment (if you’re using your work-computer—stop reading this and do some work!), take a second or two to sit back and think about what you’re doing right now…
You’re sat in front of a machine that was pure science fiction not that many years ago, indeed before the silicon chip it would have seemed pure fantasy. When computers first appeared they were the machine that was going to set the human race free. They would do all our non-creative thinking for us, all the tedious repetitive tasks that get in the way of the real imaginative work. Yet what do most of us use this wonderful, even miraculous, piece of technology for? For the most part we play games, blog about our pets’ latest illnesses, post messages to people who we’ve never met that our mood today is ‘changeable,’ and indulge in flame wars about the most inconsequential trivia. And what’s our wonderful, miraculous box of Buck Rogers techno-gimmickry doing while we do all that? For the most part, nothing. The CPU, capable of working at speeds of thousands of bits per second, sits there just about idle while our fingers type out possibly three or four characters per second. If the CPU were human it would be bored out of its skull!
BOINC—Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing—is like a trivia-quiz site for the CPU. It gives it something to think about in the years between keystrokes and the aeons waiting while you make a coffee, pick your nose or stare blankly at the screen trying to think how to start the next sentence. It’ll do a tiny bit of work in every gap between keystrokes or whatever, stop while processing the few bits you generate when your finger finally lands on a key, then take up where it left off until you hit another one. Or you can set it to run only when you’re not using the computer at all; after five minutes of idle-time, say, in which case you can also use it as a screen-saver, although that does slow it down slightly. Either way, you can rest assured that your CPU will never be bored again. And you can aid the progress of science too…
Originally developed to aid the SETI organisation in processing their reams of data by farming it out in little chunks to internet users world-wide, it has since developed into a platform for helping many scientific projects in just the same way. You can choose to help projects ranging from pure maths to climate change, from astronomy to molecular biology. There’s a partial list available on their site, but with the software available to anyone who wants to run projects like this, even they have no idea how many ‘non-official’ projects there are out there.
After you’ve downloaded and installed the software, it’ll download a few work-units and begin working on them. When it’s finished one, it’ll upload the results (these units are tiny—data-transfers’ll be over in seconds on even a slow broadband connection) and download new work.
Buck Rogers would have been proud of you…
