Volunteer Computing Needs People Just Like You

BERKELEY, Calif. - Aug. 10, 2015 - PRLog -- Even if you aren’t a scientist, your computer can be one when it’s bored.

Volunteer computing, makes use of a computer/device’s downtime to tackle some of the world’s biggest problems and questions. Projects in the fields of medicine, astrophysics, chemistry, climate science, and mathematics help researchers search for massive galaxies, extraterrestrial intelligence, cures for cancer and other diseases, subatomic particles, prime numbers, and more. One project, BitcoinUtopia uses crowd computation to mine bitcoins which are then donated to science projects including other volunteer computing projects.

Volunteers using BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), contribute greater computing power to researchers (for free) than they’d get using the world’s most powerful supercomputer (which cost $390 million to build and isn’t cheap to run).

This incredible tool has an impressive track-record. Last year, researchers at UW, making use of computation provided through BOINC, successfully designed an artificial protein that triggers self-destruction of a certain class of cancer cells. Reached via e-mail, Dr. David Anderson, BOINC’s project director, architect, and developer, highlighted some other major successes: “ClimatePrediction.net found that the range of possible global warming was wider than previously thought, and their findings impacted several IPCC reports.  Einstein@Home discovered several dozen new pulsars in radio telescope data that had already been checked” thanks in part to greater computing power provided by BOINC that allowed them to use better algorithms. “Enigma@home (a project run by hobbyists) decoded several German submarine messages from World War II that had previously resisted decryption.”

Another measure of volunteer computing’s impact is the number of scientific publications it has contributed to. This number currently stands at ~150 and is sure to keep growing given the number of active and recently completed projects.

While this technology has been around since the late 90’s, the number of active volunteers is relatively small at least compared to what it could be given the number of computers and devices that sit idle around the world at any given moment. BOINC claims roughly 3 million users, of which, a couple hundred thousand are considered “active”. World Community Grid, a volunteer computing initiative by IBM, claims nearly 700,000 members. BOINC and WCG software can run on most computers and on android devices, which combined, now number in the low billions globally.

With less than 1% of eligible devices participating in volunteer computing, it is clear this incredibly powerful and valuable technology has room to grow. If more people joined BOINC or World Community Grid, scientists’ ability to tackle the world’s greatest problems would be dramatically improved. If you think cancer, malaria, AIDS, Ebola, influenza, clean energy, clean water, climate change, or searching for intelligent life are important things to study, then why not volunteer your computer’s downtime? You get to pick the projects your device works on and if you get really into boosting your impact, you can let the software run in the background even while you use your computer. If you enjoy competition, you can join a team based on your school, company, geographical location, political beliefs, life philosophies, or religious affiliation and try to out compute your rivals.

If enlisting your computer or device as a volunteer leaves you craving a more active role in helping scientists, you can participate in crowd-sourced projects through sites like The Zooniverse which offer enjoyable, yet productive, ways to use your brain and kill time online. I often take a break from working on my personal writing and research projects to help in the search for distant planets, Higgs Bosons, or gravitational lenses. Working on these tasks often feels like playing Where’s Waldo, but you are actually helping scientists do real science.

You don’t have to be a big-time scientist to help one out. That is the beauty of both volunteer computing and crowd-sourced science.

For more information, visit: http://volunteercomputing.org/