With all the excitement surrounding the imminant activation of the LHC it is worth remembering that you too can play your own little part in history’s biggest and bravest experiment (can you think of another instance of an entire subject area resting on the outcome of a single test?)
The idea of volunteer computing, getting ordinary people to donate their computing resources over the internet to help perform large calculations using for large science research projects, is not new. It is, however, worth noting that the LHC also uses this form of computing through the project LHC@home. (To run this you need to first download the frequently used BOINC application.) The LHC projects will collectively produce around15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data each year and sorting it all out requires a hell of a lot of computing power. I urge as many of you as possible to download the software and get helping: yes kids – particle physics needs YOU!!! (Trying to do this on computors in your department or university network may create problems concerning administrative privilages, but you can at least spare a bit your laptop’s power, surely?)
With more relevence to mathematics, there have been several projects of this kind before, many of which are still active. The GIMPS have broken the record for finding the largest prime number known to man several times over. Other prime number related efforts include prime grid, the rieselsieve project and VTU. Those less interested in prime numbers can also assist with problems such the rectilinear crossing number problem, play with sudoku or even search for generalized binary number systems.
Go forth and calculate…
