BOINC and SETI and the hunt for aliens

Mar 3 2008 By Giles Turnbull

You may perhaps have heard of the SETI project, which scans the skies for transmissions from alien cultures in the hope that one day, a message from light years beyond will arrive in our out-of-the-way solar system.

You may also have heard of SETIhome, which is an offshoot created to help the SETI project process the vast amounts of data generated by the sky-scanning.

SETIhome began years ago, taking the form of a screensaver that people could download and install on their home computers. When those computers were idle, they’d start running SETIhome instead of displaying some useless graphic of spinning words.

The screen would be kept busy (which is after all the purpose of a screensaver), and the computer itself would be put to use at the same time.

Each copy of the screensaver would periodically download another batch of data and scan through it, looking for patterns that might indicate the presence of intelligent communication.

SETIhome was the first widely-known example of something called "distributed computing".

The computers taking part were nothing special in themselves, but their combined activity was a powerful force indeed, providing number-crunching power far beyond anything the SETIhome project could have afforded with its own limited resources.

That was back in the 1990s. SETIhome still exists (setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu), but now the concept of distributed computing has grown and metamorphosed into something even more ambitious.

The result is BOINC, which stands for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (boinc.berkeley.edu). BOINC takes the SETIhome concept and opens it up for other scientific projects. There are now 22 projects listed at the BOINC site, all of them taking advantage of the same technical infrastructure that made SETIhome such a success.

Each one works in the same way. Users who download the BOINC software can pick any project they wish to support, and set their computer to work on it when it has spare time.

The projects cover many different areas of research. They include climateprediction.net, by a team at Oxford University, aiming to run a computer model of climate change many thousands of times so that it can be made more accurate.

There’s also PrimeGrid.com, which is on the hunt for extremely large prime numbers. Or Einsteinhome, searching through astronomical data for pulsars in deep space.

That’s the beauty of the BOINC system: all you need do is download one piece of software from the BOINC site, and with that you can support as many of these projects as you wish, or even switch from one to another as the mood takes you.

Whichever project you do support, you can be confident that your computer will no longer be wasting energy when you leave it to go and make a cup of coffee. Every spare few minutes that it gets will be spent sorting and crunching numbers for scientific projects. Who knows, your computer’s contribution might make all the difference.

* Giles Turnbull has a website at www.gilest.org