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Academic research doesn't just cost a lot of money, more often than not it also requires a significant amount of computing power. In many cases, it is not viable to get this computational power from a single (super)computer.
BOINC
This is where BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) steps in. The BOINC client connects the personal computers of volunteers to a computational network that divides the work between every client. This way, a big task is split into many small ones that can be done while the owner of the pc is not using it. Using this method of distributed computing, the BOINC network reaches an average computing power of 18.000 PetaFLOPS (Floating-point Operations Per Second). Users who install the BOINC client can choose to participate in many different research projects, such as SETI@Home, Rosetta@Home and Einstein@Home.
SETI@Home
SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has their own BOINC project, where your computing power is used to search intercepted signals for traces of messages or even just remnants of extra-terrestrial communication. The SETI@Home project is being run by the University of California Berkeley.
Rosetta@Home
Baker Laboratory at the University of Washington is running Rosetta@Home, a BOINC programme that analyses the three-dimensional structure of proteins. Finding out the distinctive folding of every protein can be a tremendous help in discovering cures for many well-known diseases, such as Malaria, Alzheimer's, HIV and all kinds of Cancer. The creators of Rosetta@Home also published Foldit, a puzzle game about protein folding where the highest scoring solutions get reviewed by researchers for possible applications in medicine.
Einstein@Home
For those that are more interested in aiding Physics research, more specifically Astronomy, there is Einstein@Home: a project that uses your computation power to search gravitational waves from "spinning isolated compact objects", such as pulsars. The data for this project is supplied by the LIGO gravitational wave detector, and the project is run by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Appendix
A lot of people feel that their contribution will be too small to make any difference, but in writing this article, I attempt to convince everyone to install BOINC and give it a try. Projects such as this one can only thrive on a large user base, and it has been proven invaluable to many research projects in the past. This is an easy way for anyone to contribute to academic research that shouldn't be passed by. The BOINC client is available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux.
BOINC is a distributed-computing client that allows you to contribute your pc's idle time to various research projects of your own choice.
SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has their own BOINC project, where your computing power is used to search intercepted signals for traces of messages or even just remnants of extra-terrestrial communication. The SETI@Home project is being run by the University of California Berkeley.
Rosetta@Home
Baker Laboratory at the University of Washington is running Rosetta@Home, a BOINC programme that analyses the three-dimensional structure of proteins. Finding out the distinctive folding of every protein can be a tremendous help in discovering cures for many well-known diseases, such as Malaria, Alzheimer's, HIV and all kinds of Cancer. The creators of Rosetta@Home also published Foldit, a puzzle game about protein folding where the highest scoring solutions get reviewed by researchers for possible applications in medicine.
Einstein@Home
For those that are more interested in aiding Physics research, more specifically Astronomy, there is Einstein@Home: a project that uses your computation power to search gravitational waves from "spinning isolated compact objects", such as pulsars. The data for this project is supplied by the LIGO gravitational wave detector, and the project is run by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Appendix
A lot of people feel that their contribution will be too small to make any difference, but in writing this article, I attempt to convince everyone to install BOINC and give it a try. Projects such as this one can only thrive on a large user base, and it has been proven invaluable to many research projects in the past. This is an easy way for anyone to contribute to academic research that shouldn't be passed by. The BOINC client is available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux.
BOINC is a distributed-computing client that allows you to contribute your pc's idle time to various research projects of your own choice.
