BOINC???

What is Boinc???

BOINC stands for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing.
This is the next step after four years of SETI@home. BOINC will handle several projects as a user interface, where the project's application (and updates/patches) are loaded in the background together with one or more WUs (Work Units). A user can decide what projects to join, how many days of cache BOINC should handle and other nifty stuff like dial-up automatically, manually or for permanently connected computers like for instance DSL or cable.

BOINC itself is open source, the development being hosted at sourceforge.net, whereas the projects software most probably won't be.

Where can I find BOINC?

• At the BOINC website itself
• at sourceforge.net

What Projects are there to be run on BOINC?

AstroPulse is the first official project.
Based at UC Berkeley, it analyzes radio telescope signals, looking for short broadband signals that could be evidence of black hole evaporation, pulsars, or life. Sounds familiar? It is! AstroPulse analyzes the same data recorded at Arecibo Radio Observatory that was distributed to SETI@home clients, but now looking for different signals: pulses that only last for a microsecond.

This type of signal is different from those which would be caught by SETI@home. Since the pulses are so fast, they are broad-band signals. The full 2.5 MHz bandwidth is needed for a maximum sensitivity, whereas SETI@home breaks up this frequency band into 256 10 kHz sub-bands. Also, pulses traveling through the interstellar medium (the thin gas which fills the space between stars in our galaxy) become "dispersed," or stretched out in time. This effect can be corrected with a specialized algorithm (known as "coherent de-dispersion"), but it is very computation intensive, which is why this is a good distributed computing project.

There are several possible sources for this type of signal. One possible source which is already known is called a pulsar. This is a rapidly spinning neutron star which "beams" radiation at us every time it rotates. This kind of search may uncover new pulsars, since no one has looked for pulses this fast before. Another possibility is extraterrestrial civilizations - a series of pulses could be an easily recognized signal, and a pulse with negative dispersion would stand out as obviously artificial (natural dispersion always causes faster frequencies to arrive first). A third possibility is an evaporating black hole. It has been theorized that a black hole which completely evaporates will give out a short radio pulse at the end of its life, but no one has seen this happen yet. This kind of search will be at least 100 times more sensitive than previous efforts.[1]

Arecibo? I only hear Arecibo. Isn't that in the northern hemisphere where we have been analyzing results for almost 4 years?

That's correct. Arecibo covers the northern lower 40 degrees latitude of the sky as viewed from the equator.
The good news is that the southern hemisphere search (funding permitting) will begin in October 2003. But the bad news is that the southern hemisphere search will begin in October 2003.[2]

SETI@home will then start as a BOINC project, analyzing data from the southern hemisphere as well.

And quoting a reply in the BOINC mailing list:
As for SETI@home and BOINC, SETI@home 2 will run on BOINC.  We're still not sure if we will release the original SETI@home for BOINC.

References:

[1] Berkeley SETI future

[2] Team Ars Technica Lamb Chop News of Dec. 17