Here is what I wrote as a comment in The Economist.

We need all the help we can get, and we need to use any platform availble to spread the mesage:

"After I wrote this, I saw wdnutter's post, upon which I am expanding.

As is so often the case, the writer failed to mention the real origin of the software used on the project. While it originated with the SETI project, it is BOINC, Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, at http://boinc.berkeley.edu. The major domo is Dave Anderson. The software is "open Source", and any group can use it.

BOINC has a veritable plethora of very valuable projects using the software. Projects in protein folding, pulsars, the Large hadron Collider, chemotherapy, study of the cosmos, study of the Milky Way, and many others at august institutions an universities the world over have us "crunchers" saving them literally thousands of hours of lab time.

Another very worthwhile group of projects, which do happen to use the BOINC software are organized through World Community Grid, http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org. These projects tend to be in the area of studying diseases such as AIDS, Dengue Fever, and Cancer, plus a project to find more nutritious rice.

Please visit the indicated URL's and give us a look. We need everyone we can get, as many computers as we can get. One billion computers in the world, and less than 200,000 of us at any one time.

The user can be running Windows, Mac, Linux, we take all comers. The user downloads and installs a little piece of software from BOINC, and then attaches to which ever projects he/she wants. BOINC distributes work units, "WU's", and keeps track of the whole thing. There are teams which one can join, or not. And there are further organizations and web sites which keep track of all of the statistics."

>>RSM

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Nice contribution mitrichr, well done!

On some news websites ,the comments are displayed on the same page. Economist displays them one click further away, its a shame!. If the comments were on the same page, more folks would see what you said.

You summed it up very nicely!

John.

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You summed it up very nicely!

Indeed.

We need to get this fact into people's heads: "distributed computing is not just SETI@Home"

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