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| Personal background |
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| I am just one nerd. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I run SETI@home because I love the idea of contributing something to science -- even if it's only just some spare computer cycles. When I was younger, I was captivated by Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" series on television. I jumped at the chance to run SETI@home as soon as I learned of its existence. My enthusiasm spilled over onto my friends, colleagues and family, many of whom now run SETI@home and other BOINC projects. Come to think of it, we should probably form a team...
SETI@home was my introduction to distributed computing and I think it's absolutely brilliant. It proved that a large distributed computing project was possible and practical. User rankings appeal to our competitive natures and motivate us to keep our hardware as current as is practical. This does not apply to me, however. Most of my hardware is salvaged because I'm cheap and I like to make a silk purse from a sow's ear. It's fun to tinker and see something that you literally pulled out of the trash crunching numbers for scientific research. I currently run SETI@home on four machines -- three of which are dual-processor rigs.
For me it's not so much about bragging rights. I don't really care how much work is attributed to me. And, with my hardware, I'll never make the list of top 100 users. But it's fun to help nontheless.
BOINC is brilliant. Thanks to BOINC, I'm able to contribute to protein prediction and climate prediction, too. BOINC ensures that my systems never want for worthwhile work to do.
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