: Quake-Catcher Network

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Rod Van Meter [rdv () sfc wide ad jp]
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2008 12:25 PM
To: David Farber
Subject: Quake-Catcher Network

Dave, for IP, if you wish...

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.

<snip>

> From the news section of Nature this week.

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080326/full/452397a.html

http://qcn.ucr.edu/

It's based on BOINC, the same base for distributed computation as
SETI@home.  The software's not yet publicly available.

                --Rod



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