Hitch Your Cell Phone to a Star – Cal Scientists Harness App Power

By Charles Burress

The idle computing power of one smartphone may not solve the world's problems, but UC Berkeley researchers believe that millions of them harnessed together could produce important discoveries.

That's the premise behind a new cell-phone app launched this week called "BOINC," designed to combine the unused processing power of many people's smartphones for special research projects like Einstein@Home, which scans data from radio telescopes looking for signs of spinning stars known as "pulsars."

Other projects include FightAIDS@Home, which seeks AIDS therapies as part of IBM’s World Community Grid, according to acampus press release about the new app.

The app so far is only for the Android operating system, employed in two-thirds of smartphones. An app for iPhone and iPads may be on the way, the campus said.

“There are about a billion Android devices right now, and their total computing power exceeds that of the largest conventional supercomputers,” said David Anderson, a research scientist at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory who created BOINC. He was quoted in the press release.

“Mobile devices are the wave of the future in many ways, including the raw computing power they can provide to solve computationally difficult problems,” Anderson said.

The app takes its name from an ongoing Berkeley project named BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), whose computer-linking software is used for about 50 volunteer computing projects around the world. 

“Our main goals are to make it easy for scientists to use BOINC to create volunteer computing projects to further their research, and to make it easier for volunteers to participate,” Anderson said.

"Anderson noted that the app will run only when the phone is plugged in and charging and after the battery is more than 95 percent charged, since computing can slow the recharge rate," the campus said. "It will only communicate with computing projects through the Internet when connected via WiFi, to avoid burning through users’ data plans. These default settings can be customized by users, however."

Funding for developing the app came from the Max Planck Institute (which runs Einstein@Home), Google, and the National Science Foundation, which has been supporting BOINC since 2002, the campus said. IBM helped with designing the user interface and testing the app.

The project is the latest extension of the "distributed computing" venture that began in 1999 at Cal's Space Sciences Lab called "SETI@home," which harnessed the idle power of thousands of personal computers to analyze radio telescope readings for signs of intelligent life in outer space. Headline writers dubbed it the "Search for ET" and "ET, call home."

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