Imagine that you are a student at the University of Pisa in Italy. The year 1610 and you have just heard that Galileo Galilei is looking for students to help him with some mathematical calculations. He says that these calculations will prove that the Earth revolves around the Sun, just as Copernicus predicted one hundred years earlier. Although you will not receive any sort of payment for your work, you will be given the opportunity to be part of a historic project. Galileo has said the project will stretch over years to make all the night-sky observations, this also including the time to make all the calculations that are necessary to prove that the heliocentric model of our solar system is true. But if he had other people to so all the mathematical calculations for him, all he will have to do is make the observations and double-check the work the others have done for him. By himself, he will have one hundred sheets of paper with calculations written on them that need to be completed. If there were just ten volunteers, each student could work on ten pages and the work will be completed in one-tenth of the time.

Okay, that example may be fictitious, but it does serve as an example of how the BOINC (the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) framework runs. BOINC is a non-commercial framework that unites the operators of science-related projects that can not afford to purchase time on a supercomputer with the personal computers owned by hundreds of thousands of volunteers.

The way it works is simple; a very large, computationally intensive project is divided into thousands of small work units on a server. The BOINC client software that is installed on participants’ computers requests a work unit from the server. After it has completed the work unit – which could take a few hours or a few weeks depending on the project – the client sends the results back to the server where it can be double-checked and then integrated with the other completed units.

Currently, BOINC has about 322,000 active computers that are processing on an average 4.304 petaFLOPS. This is over two times the power of the fastest supercomputer in the world today – the Cray XT5 Jaguar. The BOINC software runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, various Linux-based operating systems, and offers volunteer participants the opportunity to contribute to real scientific projects in areas such as: mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics. These projects publicize their work in reputable, peer-reviewed scientific journals.

For those of you who are like me and have an interest in space, astronomy, or physics, here are a number of projects that are currently open and accepting new volunteers. They include:

MilkyWay@home

This project is a collaboration between the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the National Science Foundation. It uses data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to generate highly accurate three dimensional dynamic models of stellar streams (a large group of stars moving together through a galaxy). These stellar streams are likely to have been small globular clusters of stars that were absorbed by our galaxy.

Einstein@home

This is a project by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee that uses data from LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory). Its purpose is to search for evidence of gravitational waves from distant sources such as pulsars.

Cosmology@home

This project generates and compares theoretical models of the universe to available astronomical data from sources such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.

SETI@home

This is the largest project using the BOINC framework. Its purpose is to analyze radio signals from the Arecibo radio telescope. Radio signals with power spikes, Gaussians, and pulsing signals are not naturally occurring, and indicate that the source of the radio signal could be intelligent beings in another part of the galaxy.

The BOINC client can be downloaded at http://boinc.berkeley.edu

There is HELP section on the site and a list of active projects that need new volunteers to sign-up, install the BOINC software, and begin contributing to real scientific research.