CITIZEN SCIENTIST: Podcast interview with David Anderson, research scientist, principal investigator, and director of the University of California at Berkeley’s BOINC project and SETI@home project

Play Podcast  (Right click to download)

In the 1997 Sci-Fi thriller “Contact,” Jody Foster played a research scientist at work on a project called “SETI” — the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The “search,” as it turns out, did not involve death-defying space voyages into unknown galaxies (well, not initially, anyway), but the slow, methodical crunching of data gathered from hundreds of radiotelescopes, turned to the sky like giant ears, listening for ... something.

As it turns out, “Contact,” is based on a real project involving signals gathered with radiotelescopes and analyzed at the SETI Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to exploring, understanding, and explaining the origin, nature, and prevalence of life in the universe. But unlike the movie, which only references in passing the essential work of gathering and analyzing all that data, geeks among us might be interested in how a nonprofit institute based at a publicly-funded university could afford the kind of megacomputing power necessary to coax even the weakest of signals from the sky.

A top-secret government supercomputer?

No. The SETI@Home project has found a way to create the worlds largest and most powerful supercomputer, by tapping into something called Volunteer Computing — breaking up all that data into small chunks that are downloaded by home computer users around the world. These chunks are crunched by the volunteers’ CPUs when they are not in use; next, the SETI program notifies the user, who uploads the analyzed data chunk and downloads another from the site. Thousands of hours of CPU time, 24/7, are donated free of charge to the project, and thousands of home computer users become members of a community of ever-widening citizen scientists.

In this interview, meet the project’s director, David Anderson, who talks about SETI@home and other projects that now reside under the umbrella of the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (yep, BOINC). Learn how Anderson, with just one other staff member, navigate issues like security and project management, to push the limits of both distributed computing and Open Source computing to intergalactic heights.

Resources

SETI@home

BOINC

Bio

David Anderson is a research scientist, principal investigator, and director of the University of California at Berkeley’s BOINC project and SETI@home project. His research interests include distributed systems, realtime and multimedia systems, graphics, computer music, communication protocols, and psychometrics applied to learning and aesthetic preference.

Production Credits

Dana Farver, Executive Producer, Communities Editor-in-Chief
Tom Parish, Audio Producer, Show Host
Kimberly Stone, Web Development Manager
Scott Ebner, Web Developer