The SETI@Home team also contributed to the creation of BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. BOINC is basically the ‘@Home’ portion of volunteer DC projects, providing a middle-ware infrastructure upon which other DC projects can operate and obtain volunteer computing resources. SETI@Home has transitioned its work onto the BOINC platform and now has nearly 310,000 users moved over to the new platform providing access to around 625,000 computers. The computing power of the combined BOINC SETI users, who provide 9,674.2 GigaFLOPs of processing prowess, is considerable. It would place the BOINC SETI users at the 29th slot in the Top 500 Supercomputers list. All of BOINC combined comes in at 101,725.5 GigaFLOPs, or #2 on the Supercomputer list. (IBM’s BlueGene/L does 280,600 GigaFLOPs and cost over $100 million.)

The “Classic” SETI@Home client will be forever shut down in just three days, on December 15, 2005. In the two weeks since a story announcing the transition appeared on slashdot.org on November 23, the number of new users of the BOINCified SETI has grown by over 58,000 or 23%. Other BOINC projects, such as Einstein@Home, Rosetta@Home, and Predictor@Home have seen a similar increase in their user base over that time period. Einstein +13,000 (+19%), Rosetta +15,000 (+165%!!!), and Predictor +6,650 (+20%). However, SETI still accounts for 63.4% of the work done by BOINC users.

Of all those who joined SETI@Home on the same day as me, five years ago, 84 have persevered and submitted work units within the last month. My last work unit submitted was in January of this year, having completed 1,872 work units taking 4.106 years of CPU time, averaging 1.02 results per day. This places me in 188,402nd place among SETI Classic users, a rank shared by 82 others. I completed more work units than 96.533% of SETI@Home Classic users.

Currently the computers I have myself are fairly busy acting as servers or as my personal laptop, but the student group at Boalt I am so overly-involved with, boalt.org, now has its own BOINC teams where the boalt.org office computers and computers of members contribute to various BOINC projects. You’re welcome to join us.

These are both good advice.

The first piece of advice, “Share” is good advice because sharing makes the world a nicer place to live. It’s not a notion that economists can understand, as they tend to falsely assume that everything that humans do is driven by a profit motive. I think they just had bad kindergarten teachers.

The second piece of advice, “Share alike” is also good advice, and maybe even more important. Once someone shares with you, you ought to take it to be your duty to share with others in the same way that you have been shared with. This amplifies the good done by sharing and makes the world even nicer. Let me give you a simple example:

Yesterday I went to fix my wife’s computer at the University where she studies. (Release,Renew,I’m done.–Another story.) As I was sitting in my car in the short-term metered parking area waiting for a spot to become available, a guy who was leaving took the little parking meter slip out of his car, walked over to my car, and said, “Here. It’s good for all day.” He shared. It made my world much nicer.

As I was leaving, I saw a woman in her truck waiting for my spot. I took the parking meter slip out of my car, walked over to her truck, and said, “Here. It’s good for all day.” I shared alike. She smiled a really big smile. I am confident it made her world much nicer. (Now, it may even be against the University’s parking policies to do that, but don’t get me started on the parking nazis.)

Now, if I were merely driven by a profit motive, I could have told her, “Hey! I’ve got this parking pass good for all day that I’ll sell to you for a dollar. It would normally cost you $6!” I am a walking counter-example to classical economic assumptions. There are lots more just like me.

This “Share Alike” notion has also caught on within certain licensing practices. Free Software licenses, like the GNU General Public License, have a “share alike” provision. They encourage you to share the software with others, but require you to share the software on the same terms that you received it. You cannot place additional restrictions on the use of the software. This keeps the software maximally shareable, and makes the world a much nicer place.

The Creative Commons has a license that they actually call “Share Alike” which this very blog is licensed under. (See sidebar.) It means that you can re-use what you find here, under certain specified conditions, so long as you also allow others to use it under those same conditions. This keeps my random musings here shareable, and I hope, makes the world a nicer place.