BOINC!

Long ago, in a previous lifetime when I was in university, I was a fervent supporter of SETI(at)HOME . It was great, donating my idle CPU time to a greater good of the search for aliens. It was also cool to see the program running FFTs on the screen saver and scratch your head wondering what the heck it was doing, even though I had a minute idea of what FFTs are at that time.

I've even seen people running the program on the university's computing center's work stations just to chalk up credits for themselves.

Fast forward to today...well...my friend passed me a Carl Sagan book a few months back, and while reading it, reminded me of my university days when I ran the SETI(at)HOME program. (Carl was intimately involved in the SETI program).

Yesterday, I went looking for the program again. It'd be cool to run those FFTs on my super fast Sempron 64 now (not sure if the program is optimized to use 64-bit processors). Back in those days, running on an Athlon 700MHz was...umm...slow.

They're now part of BOINC. Which is really cool! Not only can you help out in the SETI program, you can also help to find pulsars, predict climate, control malaria and numerically solve number theories.

I've signed on again to help. Makes me feel a bit better to contribute what little I have to the greater good of mankind.