SETI
Topic: Technology
The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (S.E.T.I.) project at Berkely has changed... well, at least the "at home" portion of it has. They still have a backlog of samples taken from outer space using the Arecibo radio telescope, looking for signs of intelligent radio communication. They still want you to use your computer's spare processor time to help them look. And it's still a project at Berkeley. But now they're using Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC)* as a hosting client for the project.

Evidently, the idea caught on. It's also been used for a project to decode the human genome (I think that one's finished). There's a slew of participating projects in several languages, all of which have a goal that requires serious computing time, and all of which want your help. Computer time is expensive. The concept that your home computer can help by analyzing data clusters for them, effectively donating computer time to a project, has helped S.E.T.I. catch up a lot of their data, and other projects know a good idea when they see one.

Berkeley developed BOINC to facilitate these projects. They took a good idea and made it available to an even broader range of people, all in the name of science.

I get choked up just thinking about it.

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*Acronym by some nerd that thinks it's just hi-freakin'-larious.

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