Citizen Science and Grid Computing

japonicus writes "The Economist has an article summarizing the current state of distributed computing (think SETI@home and its ilk), which suggests that distributed-human projects are going to be the next big thing. (We discussed one such project, the Galaxy Zoo, a few months back.) The distributed-computing platform BOINC is about to expand to human processing. Distributed proofreaders have been a longstanding success (yet inexplicably failed to get even a mention in the article); but there are a lot of other projects waiting in the wings."

Wiki?

[ttapper04]

I wonder if they could borrow ideas from the wiki community.

Re:My problem with grid computing

[Charcharodon]

That's funny your comment about power usage, because that's exactly how one of the IT guys got found out by management. He was running seti@home during the night on all the work stations and servers. Finance noticed a jump in the power bill about the same time this guy was brought in to work in their IT section. He was racking up quite a few points for the 3 months or so he was getting away with it.

Shameless self promotion of my PhD research

[bcg]

Hi,

This is something that I have had an interest in for the last few years. As such, a large part of my thesis has been developing "CompTorrent". It is a computing platform that has borrowed some ideas from BitTorrent and combined them with distributed computing.

The focus has been on making distributed computing projects as easy to start as a BitTorrent swarm. After spending some quality time with both BOINC and Condor I can assure you that getting a project going from scratch, can be a non-trivial exercise.

Here's a paper if anyone is interested: Enabling grassroots distributed computing with CompTorrent [utas.edu.au]