The Civils Side of Life

BOINC

Where It All Began

In the beginning there was SETI@Home. Scientists at the University of Berkeley wanted to use data collected from radio telescopes to attempt to detect signals from inelegant life outside of our atmosphere. The soon found it difficult to analyse the huge amounts of data they collected. They came up with a plan, they realised the huge amount of wasted computering power sitting around in homes across the World could be harnessed to process the data for them.

They set about designing and releasing aprogram that anyone interested in helping could download. This program would retrieve data split into fragments, anaylise it for non-random signals and return the results to Berkeley for review. This started something big, at the end of the original [Classic] phase, SETI@Home had attracted the attention of over 5,000,000 people.

I participated in the Classic SETI@Home project for over 5 years, processing a total of 1,500 work units for the SETI@Home project.

Work Unit Certificates

The Future

BOINC Manager On December 15, 2005, after 6 years of operation, Classic SETI@home sent out its last workunit. On December 22, they stopped receiving results. BOINC is an open source software platform to allow distributed computing projects like SETI@Home and Climateprediction.net which use volunteered computer resources to run. Why leave a computer idle when it could be doing something beneficial?

Now you can participate in scientific research! If you own a computer, install the BOINC Client Software and you can help scientific research projects in many areas of science and for university research projects located all over the world.

I currently participate in five different projects covering a wide spectrum of sientific studies, from astro-biology to Earth sciences, from physics to chemistry.