I am an experimental physicist and optical designer who spent many years calculating photon scattering paths in human tissue with my own C++ codes and tracing optical paths in Zemax... all Monte Carlo methods that can use as many processors as I could afford. I got into computers with my best friend Mike Burns when we built an 8008 system at MIT back in the 70's. If we had had a garage we would be billionaires by now.
When the economy turned I had to shut down my cancer diagnostics company and go back to building death rays for DARPA (always funded). I brought my 8-processor HP workstation home (DARPA funds its own) and thought... what can I do with this that's useful? So here we are... 1 highly unlikely project (SETI), 1 not-too-unlikely (Einstein) and one with a finite endpoint (MilkyWay). So... Thank the recession for a few extra flops at least.
Have Fun
Steve
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I have followed SETI for years as a noble cause. It had to be at least a part of my effort... just to thank it for helping us to think beyond ourselves and for the original implementation of volunteer computing.
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.
