You can help map this

• Introduction to BOINC
• Old … Never Die They Just BOINC Away
• People’s Astronomy
• Volunteers Find Rare Pulsar MAYBE

Roughly 22% of all discarded computers are disposed of properly. Too many wind up in landfills where they harm the environment. In some cases IC boards are shipped off to third world countries to be melted down in 55 gallon drums. This releases a toxic soup. Colorado presently has no regulation concerning proper disposal of e-waste. This may change.

BOINC Extends Useful Life of Working Computers

My argument is that Windows should be blown off the hard drive and replaced with Linux. There are many Linux Distributions which are easy on old hardware. My own particular favorite is Slackware Once linux installation is done you are ready to participate in a new adventure.

What is MilkyWay@home?

Milkyway@Home uses the BOINC platform to harness volunteered computing resources, creating a highly accurate three dimensional model of the Milky Way galaxy using data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This project enables research in both astroinformatics and computer science.

In computer science, the project is investigating different optimization methods which are resilient to the fault-prone, heterogeneous and asynchronous nature of Internet computing; such as evolutionary and genetic algorithms, as well as asynchronous newton methods. While in astroinformatics, Milkyway@Home is generating highly accurate three dimensional models of the Sagittarius stream, which provides knowledge about how the Milky Way galaxy was formed and how tidal tails are created when galaxies merge.

For more about this and other Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) projects: Choosing BOINC Projects

Posted by The GNUinator

Open-source software for volunteer computing and desktop grid computing

Fascinating story over the weekend from Bruce Allen . A volunteer in Iowa and one in Germany running BOINC , Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing application software for Einstein@home found a pulsar, sometimes referred to as a black hole in space. Not just any pulsar thank you. Scientists aren’t sure yet but they think it could be a disrupted recycled pulsar. These are very rare. You can keep track of developments on this story by following the Einstein@home website.

Here is a quote from the story.

I want to share some good news with you.

For more than a year, Einstein@Home has been using about
one-third of the available computer time to search for radio
pulsars in data from the Arecibo Observatory. I’m happy to report
that we found our first radio pulsar last month: PSR J2007+2722.
It is still not sure, but this appears to be a rare type of object
called a Disrupted Recycled Pulsar. The discovery was published
on-line by the journal Science, on Thursday August 12th.

Congratulations to our volunteers Chris and Helen Colvin (Ames, Iowa,
USA) and Daniel Gebhardt (Universitaet Mainz, Musikinformatik, Germany),
whose computers discovered the pulsar with the highest significance!

Further details of this first Einstein@Home discovery may be found
in the main news item posted on the Einstein@Home web site, at
http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/ . You can also use Google News
and similar searches, with keywords like ‘pulsar’ or ‘J2007+2722′
or ‘Einstein@Home’ to find recent news articles about the
discovery, in English, German, French, Spanish, Russian and other
languages.

See People’s Astronomy on this blog for some amazing things that volunteers are doing. See Introduction to BOINC to find out how to get started.

See Old 770Zs Never Die for the connection between old computers (running Linux) and worthwhile science projects.

You will also find a reference to General Douglas MacArthur whose famous “old soldiers never die” comment to Congress in April 1951 inspired the title.

Connection to net neutrality

Public interest groups such as American Library Association support network neutrality.

Network Neutrality (or “net” neutrality) is the concept of online non-discrimination. It is the principle that consumers/citizens should be free to get access to – or to provide – the Internet content and services they wish, and that consumer access should not be regulated based on the nature or source of that content or service. Information providers – which may be websites, online services, etc., and who may be affiliated with traditional commercial enterprises but who also may be individual citizens, libraries, schools, or nonprofit entities – should have essentially the same quality of access to distribute their offerings. “Pipe” owners (carriers) should not be allowed to charge some information providers more money for the same pipes, or establish exclusive deals that relegate everyone else (including small noncommercial or startup entities) to an Internet “slow lane.” This principle should hold true even when a broadband provider is providing Internet carriage to a competitor.

Thanks to the American Library Association for that quote. The ‘professional left’ whoever they are are afraid that big corporations are going to ruin the Internet. The anti-intellectual right thinks that net neutrality is a plot by the Obama administration.

For the moment let us stop the political rhetoric and look at net neutrality in practical terms as related to volunteers running BOINC work units. Volunteers do not expect to make any money. The organizations running the science projects i.e. universities, Laboratories, agencies, etc. do not have extra money to guarantee fast Internet access. Guess who loses if network neutrality dies.

Posted by The GNUinator

SETI Telescope

Public Debate: “Are We Alone?” Watch the Video

SETI@home Chief Scientist Dan Werthimer participated in an exciting public debate with planet-hunter and skeptic Geoff Marcy on April 30, 2010 on campus of the University of California at Berkeley. The topic: “Are We Alone?” covered the range of issues related to the search for extraterrestrial life. Watch the video transcript here.

Posted by The GNUinator

SETI Telescope

In E&T’s second International Year of Astronomy feature, we discover that destinations for future space missions may be decided not by agencies like NASA, but by groups of ordinary people engaged in citizen computing.

Question: what kind of person does it require to detect gravity waves in the universe, or calculate the 46th prime number? If your guess is a doctoral-degree holding scientist or mathematician, you are incorrect.

We live in a world where cutting-edge technical research can be done at home. Now, with nothing but a computer with an Internet connection, any user can participate in over 50 ‘citizen-science’ projects around the world. They are for amateur astronomers, ordinary people, groups of volunteers, or even anonymous users.

I found this article on the SETI@home website.

You can access the entire article at The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The only thing I would add is that I like to participate in these projects by using a computer running Linux rather than Windows. The reason is that Linux has a lower overhead for the operating system so more of your resources go into doing the actual calculations required to get the job done.

Posted by The GNUinator