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SETI@Home Expanding Goals With Sun's Help
GabeK writes "The Register is reporting that the SETI@home project is going to be expanding the scope of their project with the help of Sun. Sun is donating a fleet of servers to the SETI@home project for use in its new BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) project. This project will use Sun's new JXTA peer-to-peer protocol for distributed computing, and will add other functions to the project other than looking for little green men. Users will now be able to dedicate slices of their idle time to projects other than SETI, like cancer research and climate mapping." We previously mentioned early word of BOINC a couple of months back.
From this page:
Status
BOINC is under development. The source code and bug-tracking database are available. We are currently conducting a beta test of BOINC using the SETI@home and Astropulse applications. The public release will be announced on the SETI@home web site. Several other distributed computing projects are evaluating BOINC.
Guess it will be some time yet.
Bill, shamelessly plugging.
Thing is SETI and other distributed computing projects have been doing just that already. For example, SETI has C/C++ clients for Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, you name it. Each has optimized assmebly cores.
As an aside:
"For its part, Sun is donating some of its midrange Solaris servers and some workstations. In addition, the SETI@home crew is dabbling with Sun's JXTA peer-to-peer protocols for future versions of BOINC."
Who ever said it was going to be in java should kick themselves in the ass. Not pointed at the OP of this thread, but at the OP of the article.
During one of the last times that Berkeley throttled their bandwith the SETI@home project moved to a different hosting location. They are now situated off campus and have their own pipe to the net. The Planetary Society has a good artical about the bandwith problems.
Boink is an old usenet term for a Real World get together, a meat, a meatspace meeting:
F -8 &oe=utf-8&safe=off&q=boink&sa=N&tab=wg
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UT
Can't for the life of me remember where the term came from, but I wonder if that was in their minds.
(yes, I know it's boinc).
SETI@Home is the most popular project, measured by number of participants, but it was actually the third large-scale, public domain, distributed computing project. A lot of its functionality and design is based on the second project, distributed.net, which in turn is based on some design ideas from the first project, GIMPS.
/. my site so I don't have to keep plugging it in these SETI@home discussions :-)
SETI@Home has definitely done a lot to popularize distributed computing, and has influenced many later projects, including protein folding projects like Distributed Folding and Folding@Home.
To see what other projects are out there, take a look at my site about distributed computing projects. And click on the links to past years (on my main index page) to see just how fast this field of science is growing.
Kirk
P.S. Somebody please