Technology News - November 3, 2004

Computers go BOINC!

For years, idle computers have been helping to forecast climate change in 2100 (Climateprediction.net), search for extraterrestrial life (SETI@home), and solve protein folding problems (Predictor@home). Developed at the University of California, Berkeley, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) schedules a participating computer’s downtime among multiple public computing projects on the basis of the user’s preference. But if a favored project does not need your computer, BOINC will switch it over to another project. The newest addition to BOINC is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC@home), a particle accelerator that will come online in 2007. BOINC is available for Windows, Mac OS X 10.3, Linux, and Solaris operating systems. For more information on how to participate, go to http://boinc.berkeley.edu.