http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080326/full/452397a.html
Link: Laptops track Earth's shakes, rattles and rolls : Nature News.
Laptops track Earth's shakes, rattles and rolls
A geoscientist devises a way to boost computing power.
Erik Vance
PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA — 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, (((oh come on, who can't like THAT))) 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. (((But what if the Space Brothers arrive DURING an earthquake?))) 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....
