Software to be launched in January will let PC users run as many ādistributed computingā projects as they like. The program will let PC users search for aliens, help predict climate change and perform advanced biological research ā all at the same time.
Distributed computing projects use a computerās spare processing power to help run vast computations, using a screen-saver-like program that they download. The first and easily the best known is SETI@home, which since 1999 has enlisted half a million people to analyse data from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, looking for signs of alien life.
More recently, Stanford University in California has enlisted 200,000 subscribers to its Folding@Home project, which simulates how proteins fold into 3D structures, while in the UK the University of Oxford now has 20,000 active subscribers to its Climateprediction.net program.
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But until now, it has only been possible to subscribe to one of these services at a time. So David Anderson, author of SETI@home, has created a new system that will make it possible to run several distributed computing projects on a single computer, and even let you specify what proportion of the computerās resources is donated to each project.
It is called the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). BOINC acts like a software platform that can run a number of screen-saver style applications on top of the PCās own operating system. The system will also solve some of the problems that have dogged distributed projects.
Cheat detection
Most importantly, from the project managerās point of view, it should stop people fooling the system into registering that their computer has processed more information than it has.
āKeeping track of how much work everybody has done is one of the prime motivations,ā says Anderson. BOINC checks this by farming out each problem twice and comparing the results. āIf the answers are different we have to assume that one of those parties may have cheated,ā he says.
Security-wise, BOINC will use strong encryption that should protect users from several types of attack and from viruses. But despite this encryption, users still take a leap of faith in installing such software, says Colin Low at Hewlett-Packard in Bristol, UK.
āIn fraudulent hands, a system like this could be used as a splendid and general mechanism for installing Trojan horse programs.ā