- Want to help unravel the mysteries of the universe?
It's easier than you think.
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We live in an amazing era of scientific discovery.
We've come a far way.
Just a couple of centuries ago, our tools barely
let us know how the universe works.
Our early telescopes could only magnify up to three times,
but today the equipment that scientists use
create mountains of data.
And now the challenge is finding meaning
in that huge pile of information.
Sure, you could rent time on a supercomputer,
but supercomputer processing time is in high demand.
It's expensive.
And sometimes supercomputers aren't going to solve
a problem fast enough.
But what if you could take that huge amount
of information and divide it into manageable chunks,
giving that chunk to a computer,
and this chunk to that computer,
and this chunk to that computer.
If you have a network of computers that's large enough,
you can solve that problem in a fraction of the time
it would take a single machine to do it.
It's called distributed computing.
Now this is not a new idea.
As soon as we invented computers, we were trying
to come up with ways to link them together
so that they could do more work for us.
But it wasn't until the 1990s that we really saw
distributed computing take off.
The current projects in distributed computing
often share two features that I really like.
One is that it uses our CPU's idle time to work
on scientific problems, and the other is it lets people
like you and me participate in scientific discoveries.
Now this means that your computer could actually
help scientists break down research while otherwise
it would just be sitting around doing nothing.
There are tons of different projects out there.
A lot of them are rolled under what is called
the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing
or BOINC.
Yeah, that's the actual acronym.
Under BOINC, all scientific disciplines are represented.
For example, SETI@home.
Now this project is combing through huge amounts
of information gathered by radiotelescopes.
What is it looking for?
Communication from intelligent aliens.
I know, right?
Then there's ATLAS@Home, which links up to
researchers at the large hadron collider
who are looking for evidence of stuff like dark matter.
And BOINC is just the tip of the iceberg.
There are other projects out there, too,
like Stanford's Folding@home,
which looks into protein folding and could lead
to a cure for diseases like Alzheimer's or cancer.
Just think, you could be part
of the next huge medical breakthrough.
Alright, so how do you get involved?
Well, typically, it just involves downloading a program
and installing it on your computer.
What that program does is accept jobs from the project,
work on those jobs when you're not doing anything else,
and send the completed work back.
If you ever have to use your computer for anything,
the program goes to sleep mode until you're done,
and then it springs back into action.
Now the really exciting thing for me
is that this doesn't just help scientists do work,
it gets us involved in science.
Often we can think of science as something
that happens on another planet.
It's so far removed from our day-to-day lives,
but this gets us active in science itself.
And, although it seems like a really small thing,
everyday people like you and me could make
a huge difference in the future with an enormous
scientific payoff.
That brings me to a question for you guys this week.
What scientific project would you dedicate
your computer's idle processing time to?
Let me know and explain why you picked that one
in the comments below.
If you enjoyed this video, make sure you hit like,
subscribe to our channel, and then let's keep
this science party going with the videos over here.
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