A couple of years ago, I wrote about a very cool citizen science project called Old Weather. This project was a massively crowdsourced effort to analyze historical weather patterns, based on observations recorded in ships’ logs. At any given time, hundreds of volunteers were logged on to the website, transcribing scans of these logs and noting data such as date, location, and temperature. This data would be sent back to the researchers for further analysis.
Imagine the same concept, applied to fields of research as diverse as microbiology and astrophysics, and completely automated. All you have to do is run a program on your computer that processes data from the researchers that you support. This is the mission of BOINC, or the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing.
Taking advantage of your computer’s downtime
When you’re not at your computer, chances are that it’s sitting idle, waiting perhaps for an email or an instant message. BOINC uses that idle time to contribute to scientific research. This means that you, alongside thousands of other contributors, can help researchers:
- find a cure for diseases such as Alzheimer’s
- study global warming
- discover new pulsars
- find large prime numbers
- find intelligent alien life
We think of ambitious research such as the above as only achievable by Ph.D’s working in a pristine lab environment. With BOINC however, you don’t need a supercomputer or any fancy setup. You just need a working computer, or laptop, and an Internet connection. Heck, you can even run BOINC from your smartphone (more on that later).
How does BOINC work?
So much data is generated by researchers these days that, even with the most powerful computers in the world, it would take an impractically long time to analyze the results. That’s where you fit in.
In a nutshell, BOINC communicates with research servers to get data to be processed. Your computer processes that data, and sends back the results to the research servers. Multiply this by thousands, even millions of users, and the researchers now have a collective computing machine more powerful than any single machine ever built.
If you’re worried that all of the processing done by BOINC will affect your computer’s performance or your laptop’s battery life, never fear! By default, BOINC sits quietly when you’re using your computer, or if your laptop is not charging. I have been running BOINC for over a year now, and I hardly notice it when I’m at the computer.
How can I participate?
BOINC takes no more than 5 minutes to set up, including creating an account to track your contributions.
- Go to the BOINC download page, and choose one of the downloads. I recommend BOINC + VirtualBox for first-time users.
- Install BOINC by clicking the file that you just downloaded.
- Choose the projects that you would like to support.
- Let it run!
BOINC starts up every time you start up your computer, so there’s no need to worry about missing out on important research.
Android user? You can participate too!
When your Android phone is charging, you can have it donate to science, too. Install BONIC for Android, available from the Google Play store.
Cool links for contributors
- See who contributes the most computing power to BOINC
- A detailed breakdown of who contributes to which projects
- Find out where you rank among BOINC users worldwide
Give BOINC a try. Who knows, your donation of computing time may play a role in finding the cure for cancer!
