You might have heard of the SETI@Home project which for the last ten years has used internet connected computers to search for signals with other worldly origins. That project has evolved over time, and now its success has spawned countless other projects that either search for things out there in the universe, track near earth objects, model climate change, look for cures to diseases, and others. This is possible due to a program called the Berkeley Open Interface for Network Computing, aka BOINC.
The original Seti@Home site is here if you want-
The BOINC site is here
You may ask what this all has to do with this blog? Well, if you go directly to a site called World Community Grid you will be able to download a version of BOINC to process data for the Clean Energy Project which is looking for the next generation of materials to use in cheaper solar panels. Of course, there are other projects you can support too. I will just concentrate on the Clean Energy one because it relates to the subject of this blog.
From the World Community Grid Clean Energy Project page, “The mission of the Clean Energy Project is to find new materials for the next generation of solar cells and later, energy storage devices. By harnessing the immense power of World Community Grid, researchers can calculate the electronic properties of tens of thousands of organic materials – many more than could ever be tested in a lab – and determine which candidates are most promising for developing affordable solar energy technology.”
If you are not familiar with the concept of network computing, once you have downloaded BOINC and chosen a project, your computer will download segments of data to process. This entire process will be done in the background as you do other things on your computer. When a segment is complete, your computer will upload the results and request more data to process. You can do as little or as much as you like, and designate your projects as you want. If you have more than one project, BOINC will distribute the computer time between them, again in the background.
Read more about the Clean Energy Project here at Green-Energy_News.
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I recommend checking out GridRepublic they are a nonprofit which is working in collaboration with BOINC to bring together the BOINC projects into a single easy to navigate website. With GridRepublic you can discover, join, and manage project settings and multiple computers with a single login. See: http://www.gridrepublic.org for more details.
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