United Press International - July 18, 2003
Irene Brown

The project quickly blossomed into what managers like to refer to as the world's biggest supercomputer: 4 million home- and office-based machines linked to the Internet and working on a common goal to find "E.T."

The project, called SETI @ home, works like a screen-saver when a running computer is idle. But instead of displaying spaceships plunging through starfields or rotating pictures of the kids, participating computers spend their downtime crunching data collected from Arecibo, the world's biggest radio telescope, located in Puerto Rico.

The computers automatically access the SETI @ home server via the Internet, receive a package of data to be analyzed and transmit any completed work. The program works as long as the computers remain online.

So far, there has been no word from any extraterrestrial beings, but the project has become a model for attempting large-scale distributed computing applications using excess data processing capacity.

"At first we thought we could get 50,000 participants," said project director David Anderson. "Turns out we got that in the first couple of hours."

Within months, a handful of business proposals were developed to tap excess computing time via the World Wide Web and sell it to a variety of clients, including pharmaceutical, financial services and other firms with high demand for analyses. Most failed, however.

"SETI @ home is a really specialized case," said Colorado State University researcher H.J. Siegel, who chairs the advisory board of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. "They don't need to get results in 24 hours or less and there are no security issues involved. If someone sees the code, no one cares and if someone sees the results, that's fine."

Siegel added: "If I wanted to do a simulation study for my research, I couldn't afford to throw it out there into cyberspace and just sit back and see who is running their screensaver program. And if I were a company running a simulation model predicting where the market is going to go, I wouldn't want my material running on some stranger's computer."

As the business plans faded, however, a far bigger demand for distributed networks -- also called grid computing -- blossomed among non-profit scientific endeavors.

"People are beginning to see more applications that can take advantage of grids," said Ralph Castain director of the Colorado Grid Initiative, an attempt to extend massive computing power and databases to high school science projects.

Two factors drive the revolution: the sheer number of personal computers and the number of machines connected to the Internet. "Ten years from now there are expected to be 1 billion computers on the Internet -- 55 percent of them privately owned," Anderson said. "Whether or not we succeed at finding E.T., we've validated this as a model for data processing on the Internet," he added.

The idea of splitting up work among a network of computers has been around for decades, but without high-speed modems and the Internet, distributed computing projects were largely restricted to university labs and government research institutes.

Now hundreds of projects are vying for idle computer time, including dozens closely modeled after the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence or SETI project. The initiatives include:

--Evolution @ home, designed to uncover potential genetic causes of extinction for endangered and threatened species;

--Folding @ home, which runs simulations on how proteins self-assemble or fold so researchers can make more accurate quantitative predictions -- misfolded proteins are believed to be key factors in a variety of illnesses, such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's disease;

--Genome @ home, a sister project to protein folding analysis, focuses on new gene and protein designs, and

--FightAIDS @ home, a research effort to design new drugs to combat Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

Similar programs envisioned to fight smallpox, Ebola virus, SARS and Anthrax are offered by d2ol.com -- the Drug Design Optimization Lab, sponsored by the Rothberg Institute for Childhood Diseases in Guilford, Conn.

Other potential applications include an attempt by climateprediction.net to model Earth's climate 50 years from now; Distributed Particle Accelerator Design, which uses computing time to help design a more efficient particle accelerator; Lifemapper.org, a University of Kansas-led effort to chart where all the species of plants and animals on Earth live and potential relocation sites; Encryption and code-busting efforts aimed to improve security standards for electronic transactions, and mathematical problem-solving, including a search for ever-larger prime numbers.

Another possibility is image rendering for computer-animated movies -- a for-pay project.

All these ideas are only the beginning, said SETI @ home director Anderson. He is working on a program that not only will help the next-generation SETI effort, but also will allow even more research efforts to tap the power of the home-based supercomputer. Called BOINC, an acronym for the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, the program is being designed so any project can easily make use of Internet-linked computers.

"A lot of projects have been spawned by SETI @ home," said project scientist Dan Werthimer. "We haven't bagged E.T. yet, but we're happy to have helped launch this home-brew computer club."

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