THE VOLUNTEER SUPERCOMPUTING REVOLUTION IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH

In the eight years since the California-based SETI Institute (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) thought of embedding software in people's screen savers that would help sift through radio noise from space for possible signals from alien civilizations, some 40 research groups have launched projects based on the same principle. Hundreds of thousands of computers have been enlisted to study how proteins fold, to search for new prime numbers and to simulate climate change, among other efforts.

Tapping the unused processing capacity of a network of individual PCs offers the power of an expensive supercomputer Latest News about supercomputer at a fraction of the cost and allows researchers to cut the lag time for some calculations from years to days.

Such "volunteer computing" studies have also spawned a quirky global subculture of home enthusiasts who are bringing their personal passion and the collaborative power of the Internet over 800,000 High Quality Domains Available for Your Business. Many volunteers are computer programmers or scientists, but others have no link to the projects aside from their own enthusiasm.

To join the projects, computer owners download a program that lets their PCs work on small pieces of a larger research problem. When a PC finishes a chunk of the calculation, it sends it off to be double-checked and plugged into the big data set.

One initiative has wooed gamers who use the Sony PlayStation 3 Latest News about PlayStation 3 console, which contains a speedy graphics processor. A Stanford University protein study called "Folding@home" now gets the majority of its processing work from the consoles.

"I donate to other causes, and I just considered this a donation to society and science," said Cory Parker, a product assurance technician from Inverness who runs Folding@home software on his four Sony game consoles. He said he uses only one PlayStation for gaming; the other three are damaged units that he bought at a discount just to further the study.

Strength in Numbers

The sheer number of people needed to make such projects worthwhile can be daunting, researchers said. Folding@home, which began in 2000 and is one of the largest undertakings, uses about 250,000 computers at any given moment.

Professor Benjamin Wandelt, director of Cosmology@home wanted to test how minor changes to initial conditions after the Big Bang could have affected how our cosmos would look billions of years later.

To address that question, Wandelt's team runs thousands of computer simulations of cosmological evolution and tinkers with the initial conditions, such as the speed of the universe's expansion or the amounts of certain fundamental particles.

However, he realized that the initial set of simulations would take about 300,000 hours of computer time -- about 30 years using an ordinary home computer. By distributing the computing chore among 2,800 users from 78 countries, Wandelt's team has amassed more than 300,000 hours of work in just six months' time.

Advancing Science

Programs such as Folding@home provide the most demanding tests of a PC's performance, many users say. Amassing an impressive processing record is a mark of achievement, and it earns users "points" -- statistics that are worthless except as tokens of a user's computing prowess.

To rack up more points, many volunteers buy computers solely to use on the projects. Michael McCord, a retired anesthesiologist from Beaumont, Texas, said he has seven PCs running the Folding@home software full-time -- and many users devote even more computers to the cause.

"The competition and camaraderie got me interested," McCord said. "I'm blessed that I can afford the electricity bill."

Intriguing Work

So far, volunteer computing has not changed how physicists think about the universe or led to any concrete cures for diseases, but researchers say they've published intriguing work stemming from the approach. Wandelt of Illinois said his team has just submitted its first paper based on results from Cosmology@home. He said he's found a way to distill his data so other cosmologists can run more speedy simulations of the early universe.

Vijay Pande, director of Folding@home, said his team has published 54 studies based on its protein-folding simulations. Proteins must fold into precise shapes in order to function properly, and many diseases can be traced to errors in folding, including Alzheimer's disease and ALS. Pande's work is designed to offer insights into that process and aid the design of drugs that could help crucial proteins fold correctly.

Yet not every scientific question lends itself to being solved by thousands of computers, each working on one tiny piece of the problem, "Some problems can't be divided,” says Vijay Pande.