It's midnight. Do you know what your computer is doing?

[rinselberg]

I know what this computer is doing: It's hard at work, splitting it's not inconsiderable processing power right down the middle, between looking for a radio signal from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization (SETI) - and looking for gravity waves - ripples in the fabric of space-time that are predicted by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

If you would like to entertain the possibility of putting your personal computer to work in the name of science, here's your website:

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing

The BOINC website allows you to select from a list of science programs that run in your computer's processing background. The programs can be set to run whenever your computer is powered up and unattended - and whenever your computer's CPU (central processing unit) has sufficient unused capacity to run the science programs without interference with anything else that you are doing online.


Schematic of a LIGO gravity wave detector. There are two LIGO installations: One in Louisiana and one in Washington State. Each of the LIGO's crossing detector arms extends for 4 kilometers (2.5 miles).


A pulsar is a neutron star that emits pulsed radio signals - and it's also a logical target for the LIGO gravity wave detectors.

It's like a donation to the scientific enterprise of your choice that costs you very little and does not inconvenience you in any recurring way.

Network security is state-of-the-art. Odds are, you'd be wiped out by a collision with a near-earth asteroid before your computer would be invaded by a software virus from a BOINC science application. You're dealing with computer security pro's!

Opticians Worldwide is a SETI team that has been setup by one of OptiBoard's members in the United Kingdom; so you can either "BOINC" as part of a team - or you can be a "BOINC of One" ...

BOINC anyone?


Graphics:
http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/LIGO_web...factsheet.html
http://forum.boinc.fr/boinc/Lesproje...ujet-193-1.htm
http://www.hispaseti.org/stats/team/..._boinc_all.php

[John Sheridan]

Sorry Rinsel but I think if people really want their computers to do something good then they should go here:

http://folding.stanford.edu/

Work on protein folding - this knowledge can be used to help cure diseases like parkinsons, huntingtons, and cancer. Much more important, in my mind at least, than scanning the sky looking for little green men or ripples in space. My computers have been doing this for years.

[rinselberg]

I wil check into this further when I have more time, but "Folding@home" - which is the Stanford program that John Sheridan has referenced - is probably a BOINC application that is not listed on the BOINC website.

From the BOINC website:

A partial list of current projects is below; you can find others using Google. Mouse over a project for details.

Astronomy/Physics/Chemistry
LHC@home
SETI@home
Quantum Monte Carlo at Home
Einstein@home
Spinhenge@home

Biology and Medicine
Predictor@home
SIMAP
Malariacontrol.net
Tanpaku
Rosetta@home
World Community Grid

Mathematics and strategy games
Riesel Sieve
SZTAKI Desktop Grid
Rectilinear Crossing Number
Chess960@home

Earth Sciences
Climateprediction.net
BBC Climate Change Experiment
Seasonal Attribution Project

You can participate in several projects, ensuring that your computer will be kept busy even when one project has no work ...

[John Sheridan]

I wil check into this further when I have more time, but "Folding@home" - which is the Stanford program that John Sheridan has referenced - is probably a BOINC application that is not listed on the BOINC website.

I am fairly certain that folding@home - or FAH as we call it - is not a BOINC. I have nothing against BOINC mind you, but the cancer and parkinsons's research "hits home" for me, so that's why I do FAH...

[rinselberg]

Most, but not all, distributed-computing projects use BOINC software. One that doesn't is Folding@home, run out of Stanford University ... The project, says Vijay Pande, a professor in Stanford's chemistry department, looks at proteins that are implicated in Alzheimer's and Huntington's disease. "Folding" is a reference to the way proteins fold themselves into various shapes; the shape of a protein is critical to how it functions. About 200,000 computers are connected to the project; Dr. Pande says he could easily make use of up to a million [computers].

Wanted: Your PC's Spare Time - this Wall Street Journal article from June 2006 is a must read for anyone who is interested in the network computing "movement" - brief, up to date, well written and covers all the bases.


However:

FAH (Folding@home) on BOINC ... BOINC is an infrastructure for doing distributed computing. BOINC is produced by the same group at LBNL which has done SETI@Home and has become a useful tool for distributed computing. We have been exploring using BOINC as an additional client in addition to the existing FAH clients in order to give donors a choice (especially those who currently run BOINC).

January 2006 We have an initial release client which we alpha tested in a small group. This has lead to some issues which have been difficult to resolve and we are delaying our launch until these issues can be resolved to our satisfaction.

April 2006 We have updated much of the code, but are now in the midst of dealing with staff turnover in the BOINC part of the development team, which has slowed development ...

http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-highperformance.html

From the computer donor's point of view - be it John Sheridan or rinselberg - it's a moot point. There may be a BOINC version of Folding@home in the near future. Folding@home works very much the same way as SETI@home and Einstein@home - the two BOINC programs that I like to run.

As I posted (previously), there are other BOINC applications that donors may choose to run, including some that are from the biomedical field and similar to Folding@home.

[rinselberg]

The SETI@home program has other objectives, above and beyond the search for a recognizably intelligent radio signal from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization.

SETI@home is helping scientists look for "evaporating" black holes and pulsars.

Famed Cambridge astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has theorized that black holes do not remain constant, but continually evaporate through a process known as Hawking radiation, until they vanish completely in a final, massive burst of radiated energy. The SETI@home software is being modified to process the SETI database of radiotelescope measurements in an effort to confirm Hawking's theory. The SETI@home staff uses the name "Astropulse" as shorthand for this spinoff research project.

The search for evaporating black holes is related to an ongoing argument about one of the fundamental tenets of quantum physics, that information (as defined in physics) is never irreversibly lost or destroyed.

The controversy is known as Hawking's Paradox.

Sources:

Volunteer Computer Grids: Beyond SETI@home
Serendipitous Science: Using Piggyback Techniques to Study the Galaxy

[John Sheridan]

Again I'm sorry Rinselberg but I think we are just going to have to agree to disagree on this one. Black holes and Hawking radiation don't mean any more to me than little green men. I think our physical science and technology has progressed far enough. What we need now is more medical knowledge, and that means projects like FAH.

Here's an interesting question - after all the effort devoted to SETI, why haven't they found anything? If the universe is as old as they say, there should be plenty of highly advanced civilizations out there sending out all kinds of detectable signals. Yet we see none. Maybe, once a civilization's technology progress far enough, they self-destruct. Just like we are on the verge of doing. When technology progresses far enough that even small nations can start making weapons of mass destruction, then maybe it has progressed too far. Perhaps this is just the natural order of things - a civilization gets to a technological level which is just a little further advanced than we are at, and then poof one day they are gone in a nuclear flash.

So, we disagree. Go ahead and do SETI, I'll stick with FAH.

[ksquared]

......if the universe is as old as they say.....

Perhaps the Universe isn’t quite as old as “they” say…..

Crisis in the cosmos? Galaxy-formation theory is in peril

Imagine peering into a nursery and seeing, among the cooing babies, a few that look like grown men. That's the startling situation that astronomers have stumbled upon as they've looked deep into space and thus back to a time when newborn galaxies filled the cosmos. Some of these babies have turned out to be nearly as massive as the Milky Way and other galactic geezers that have taken billions of years to form.

Despite being only about 800 million years old, some of the infants are chock-full of old stars.

These chunky babies may be pointing to a cosmic crisis. They don't seem to fit the leading theory of galaxy formation, which cosmologists have relied on for more than 2 decades to explain an assortment of puzzling features of the universe.

The new findings raise the question: Did the universe have enough time during its first 800 million years for infant galaxies to have merged into mature-looking behemoths?

The current theory can accommodate a few rare instances of such precocious growth by assuming that the jumbo galaxies reside in a few regions that have an unusually high density of dark matter. There, gravity would have pulled together objects faster than usual, accelerating galaxy growth.

But over the past 18 months, several teams have found so many massive galaxies from this early epoch that the <current> theory is being stretched to its breaking point....

[John Sheridan]

Every time someone comes up with a cosmological theory, someone else finds something wrong with it. I bet that 200 years from now, they will look back and laugh at us just like we now laugh at the people who used to argue about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

Anyone who thinks they are really doing an important service by having their computers work this stuff is welcome to their opinion. I don't have to agree though...

[rinselberg]

Every time someone comes up with a [new] cosmological theory, someone else finds something wrong with it. I bet that 200 years from now, they will look back and laugh at us, just like we now laugh at the people who used to argue about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Anyone who thinks they are really doing an important service by having their computers work on this stuff is welcome to their opinion. I don't have to agree ...

I wanted to post about some of the options that are available for people who might become interested in running one of the "@home" Internet collaboration programs. This forum seems like a very logical place for such a post. It could be SETI@home, or Einstein@home, or any of the other projects that are available, including the biomedical programs such as Folding@home.

I think it's fun that anyone can select from a menu of these "@home" programs the particular one or ones that they want to run.

The "@home" programs have websites that people can go to to keep up to date with the projects, and some even have their own project forums that are open for anyone to read and post on.


Do some of us post on OptiBoard for more or less the same reason(s) that moved the earliest humans to paint art on the walls of their caves? Was Cro-Magnon man history's very first existentialist?

[rinselberg]

"Put this in your pipe and smoke it ..."

The current SETI@home application looks for signals that are narrow in frequency, but have long duration. That's one way that an extraterrestrial civilization can send a signal that stands up above the radio background noise.

Another possibility is that [an extraterrestrial intelligence] could put a lot of power into a short duration pulsed signal that has a wide bandwidth. As such a pulse travels through intestellar space, interactions with interstellar matter slow down low frequencies relative to high frequencies in a process called dispersion. This dispersion spreads the pulse out over time. If we know how much dispersion a pulse has experienced, we can correct for this effect. For an extraterrestrial signal, we won't know how much interstellar matter the signal interacted with on its journey; therefore we have to try every possible dispersion measure. That takes a lot of computing time.

Astropulse is a SETI@home application that uses coherent dedispersion to search for pulsed signals. In addition to extraterrestrial signals we might see signs of evaporating black holes or discover new pulsars.

Since late 1998, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI@home) project has been recording data in a 2.5 MHz band centered at 1420 MHz, sensitive to neutral hydrogen gas, at the Arecibo radio observatory. This is done during normal astronomical observations, so this "piggyback" observing mode does not require dedicated telescope time. The existing 35 Terabyte dataset includes observations from nearly the entire sky visible from Arecibo. Some portions of the sky have been observed 50 or more times. The dataset continues to grow at a rate of about 50 Gigabytes per day.

A new data recorder, coming on line in 2003, will expand the recorded bandwidth to 100 MHz and allow multibeam observation modes. It will be used at both Arecibo and the Parkes Observatory in Australia. This project will turn this vast [SETI] dataset toward astronomical purposes.

Work has begun on using this data to conduct a survey of the neutral hydrogen (HI) distribution in the galaxy, which has been dubbed SETHI.

This survey has better angular resolution than existing single dish surveys, and better sensitivity than existing or planned interferometric surveys.

Another relatively unexplored area of radio parameter space is that of microsecond time scale dispersed pulses. PI Korpela and collaborators will develop a distributed computing application (called Astropulse) to examine the dataset for both single and repeated pulses of these durations. For single pulses, this will be the most sensitive survey of its kind.

With this survey there is the potential of detecting emissions from primordial black holes and, at the very least, it will set the best limit to date on the existence of such black holes. This survey could also detect giant pulses from unknown pulsars or detect sub-millisecond pulsars.

Broader Impacts: These projects bring contributions to the astronomical community at a relatively low cost. Since the data exist for other purposes, the cost of instrumentation is non-existent. The techniques developed for distributed computation and storage and analysis of vast datasets will be of significant value to the astronomical community.

The University of California Berkeley group has a long standing commitment to education and public outreach. The SETI@home program has already vastly increased public interest in science in general. Thousands of K-12 teachers use SETI@home in their science curriculum and SETI@home is part of the Great Exploration in Science and Mathematics (GEMS) program.

Because the HI survey (SETHI) and Astropulse are considered to be an extension of SETI@home, these projects allow a natural path into discussion of the Galaxy and its structure, black holes, and even cosmology.

The project web site will be a resource for teachers to learn and to teach about these aspects of astronomy.

Students at both the graduate and undergraduate level have been involved [with] SETHI and Astropulse. The Astropulse primary analysis code is being written by a graduate student. The Astropulse results will form a significant portion of a Ph.D. thesis.

Source: http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showA...Number=0307956


More than just a search for little green men