By far the easiest way to get involved with a citizen science project is to let your computer do all the work: sign up for a so-called distributed computing project, install and configure some software, and voila! You’re contributing valuable CPU time to an important cause, and you don’t even have to break a sweat.

Today, I’m going to talk a bit about the concept of distributed computing, why it’s important, and then I’ll point you to one of the major platforms being used to do distributed computing.

Prior to the advent of distributed computing, researchers with big projects requiring a lot of computer power had to try to score time on their university’s super computer. As you might imagine, competition for a time slot was fierce: there were lots of problems requiring lots of computer cycles, and resources were limited. You could wait weeks or months for a slot that might or might not be long enough to accomplish your project goals, and heaven forbid something should go wrong with the system in the meantime, as that would mean further delays.

Then along came the rise of personal computing. While home computers certainly aren’t super computers, they are reasonably powerful, and more to the point, unless the user is actively playing an intensive PC game or rendering 3d movies, the CPU is actually idle most of the time. Someone lit upon the idea of harnessing all of those idle CPU cycles, and “distributed computing” was born.

The concept is this: break up a very large project into millions of smaller tasks, and then hand off those tasks to thousands of computers.You still need a decent server to communicate with all the remote devices, and a robust software program to coordinate all of those tasks, but both of these were cheaper to implement than additional super computer time.

The most popular distributed computing platform is called BOINC. The short form stands for the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, and it was originally developed to support the SETI@home project (a program designed to analyze radio signals, searching for signs of extra terrestrial intelligence). First started in 2002, the platform currently has more than 295,000 volunteers running the program on just under 1 million computers. That might sound like a lot, and indeed it provides projects with a fairly spectacular amount of computational power. However, it’s really only scratching the surface of what’s available. Think of it: how many computers do you have in your home alone? How many are in your office?

BOINC currently supports just over 40 projects, which I’ll cover in separate posts. But you don’t have to wait for me… go ahead and check out the software and see if there’s something you’d like to help out!