From; THE PLANETARY SOCIETY
In the beginning was SETI@home, the first large-scale volunteer computing project, launched in 1999 with seed money from The Planetary Society. Within months the project had millions of volunteers around the world joining to form the most powerful computer network ever assembled. Other projects soon followed, focused on everything from the search for large prime numbers to protein folding.
Then, in 2002, David Anderson, SETI@home’s own director, launched BOINC, the Berkeley Online Infrastructure for Network Computing. Instead of different projects each with its own platform and volunteer community there was now a growing family of projects, all sharing the BOINC platform. Volunteers no longer had to subscribe to a single project, but could divide their computer’s time as they saw fit between different BOINC ventures.
But just down the hall from SETI@home headquarters at the Space Science Laboratory in Berkeley, a different approach was taking shape. Planetary scientist Andrew Westphal was trying to figure out an effective way of detecting the interstellar dust grains embedded in the collector of the spacecraft Stardust. Computers, he found, could not pinpoint the elusive particles, but a practiced human eye could. The only problem was that no single person could hope to go over the millions of microscopic observations required for scanning the entire collector, and retain his or her sanity. Inspired by what Anderson and SETI@home chief scientist Dan Werthimer were accomplishing a few doors away, Westphal wondered: is it possible to harness the visual capabilities of thousands of volunteers, just as SETI@home harnesses their computer CPUs?
It wasn’t easy to translate the experience gained in volunteer computing to this new model that required the active participation of volunteers. But working in close cooperation with Anderson, and with support from The Planetary Society, Stardust@home was launched in August of 2006. Along with a NASA Ames project called ClickWorkers, dedicated to cataloguing craters on Mars, Stardust@home represented the first generation of scientific projects, in which members of the public working online contributed not computer time, but brain power.
The remarkably creative feedback loop at Berkeley's Space Science Laboratory did not end there. Westphal, who was originally inspired by the success of SETI@home to launch Stardust@home, now returned the favor. Just as SETI@home spawned BOINC, Anderson wondered, could Stardust@home beget its own universal platform? Only in this case, instead of facilitating projects where personal computers do all the work, the new platform would make it possible for volunteers to use their minds and skills in support of scientific projects.
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