Very high geekdom - Quake-Catcher Network
Hat tip to
Slashdot for a link to
this article in Nature:
Laptops track Earth's shakes, rattles and rolls
A geoscientist devises a way to boost computing power.
A seismologist at Stanford University in California has developed a computer program for tracking earthquakes in real time. It uses thousands of volunteers' computers and may someday be fast enough to issue warnings just before an earthquake strikes.
Quake-Catcher Network, as it's called, uses the accelerometers built into many new computers, which sense when a computer is dropped so that the hard drive can be shut down. But seismologist Jesse Lawrence found that the sensors could also pick up on more subtle movement. Thus was born the latest iteration in distributed computing, which turns the unused computing power of thousands of home computers into a giant supercomputer.
The most popular distributed computing program, SETI@home, searches for signals from extraterrestrial intelligence. Quake-Catcher looks instead at the inner workings of earthquakes. Little is known about how seismic waves travel and refract deep in Earth's crust, and modelling this movement accurately takes enormous computing power, which can be generated by combining many different users on the network.
But another of Quake-Catcher's jobs is to wait for an earthquake to happen. When a computer signed up to the program senses shaking, it calculates the intensity and pings the information back to the servers at Stanford in less than a second. If enough computers detect ground shaking in the same area, the system could send out a warning to users who haven't felt it yet that an earthquake is on its way, Lawrence says.
The home page is here:
Quake-Catcher Network
It looks like they are close to launching but not quite there yet.
I would love to participate -- when I managed the test labs at MSFT, I had SETI@home running on a lot of the machines when they weren't being used. Very clever idea!
Posted by DaveH at March 28, 2008 10:06 PM