Crossfire2

Whadda ya know? You can use the idle time on your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research! All you have to do is to quit playing World of Warcraft for a sec, and Alt+Tab it to download BOINC - an open source software for distributed computing that uses the net. BOINC is an initiative of University of California, Berkeley that allows you to volunteer to allot your idle computing power to major scientific initiatives that may (or may not) change the future of mankind.

UC,Berkeley itself uses the platform to let people run SETI@home, which searches for evidence of radio communication by extraterrestrial beings using data collected by the Arecibo radio telescope. Read more at http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/.



Rosetta@home, an initiative of Howard Hughes Medical Institute at University of Washington, uses BOINC to aid research concerning the 3D shape of proteins, which would help in designing new proteins to fight diseases such as HIV, Malaria, Cancer, and Alzheimer's. The project site is http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/.
These are only two of a huge number of things you can get into with BOINC.

BOINC is available as a free download at the BOINC site http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php With a size of 9.3 MB, it is a neat little package considering the variety of nice stuff you can put it to. Cool stuff, give it a thought.

Labels: Berkeley, BOINC, Rosetta at home, SETI at home