Scientific Discoveries at Home
In my last post I mentioned N-body simulations for dark matter halos. These simulations require hundreds or thousands of hours on some of the most advanced supercomputers in the world. Massive computing power is also required in a large number of other pieces of contemporary research: the LHC, global warming, search for pulsars, various protein folding simulations, prime number searching, cures for diseases, SETI, and more.
As time goes on, more and more scientific endeavors will require large amounts of processing power/time. However, most researchers do not have the budgets required for all the calculations they’d like to perform. To this end, I’d like to suggest that everyone take a gander at the Berkley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing - BOINC. This is a program that allows one to spend excess processor cycles on any of the various endeavors mentioned above and many more.
Some projects include,
Climateprediction.net - investigating the approximations of climate change models
Einstein@home - search for pulsars
Quantum Monte Carlo at Home - structure and reactivity of molecules
PrimeGrid - search for large twin primes
It allows one to choose the projects they want to work on and the allowed processing for each project, logs their contributions, and ultimately betters humanity by increasing our knowledge! With grant money dwindling in many areas of research because of the economic downturn, let’s pitch in some elbow grease and computing power to accomplish some of our greatest goals.
This entry was posted on Friday, November 28th, 2008 at 5:28 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
