Les liaisons fructueuses - RUIG-GIAN

article how the Africa@home project has played a
role in promoting these changes, thanks to the support
of GIAN.
Pre-history of Africa@home at CERN
Female Anopheles gambiae mosquito feeding. Malaria
vector, parasite. Photo : Jim Gathany, Public Health
Image Library (PHIL), http://phil.cdc.gov/Phil/
The rise of citizen cyberscience
The World Wide Web is changing the way science is
done in many respects. One of these changes is the
way the Web is enabling millions of ordinary citizens,
with no professional scientific credentials, to
contribute in a meaningful and valuable way to science.
I call this citizen cyberscience. It is a trend that
first became widely popular through the volunteer
computing project SETI@home, launched in 1999.
This project exploits idle time on volunteer PCs to
analyze signals from a major radio telescope, in the
hope of detecting faint radio signals from a distant
extraterrestrial intelligence. Though experts consider
the chances of detecting such a signal to be remote,
still millions of people have volunteered their PCs
for this project. This they do simply by downloading
a program that runs in the background on their
computer. Optionally, a screensaver can show the
status of the computation.
Given the enormous latent computational power of all
the computers connected to the Internet, the growth of
citizen cyberscience projects may well herald the beginning
of a technological paradigm shift in how scientists
solve a wide range of challenging problems. Equally
significant, from a sociological perspective, is that
citizen cyberscience represents a promising new way
to engage the public in science, and to engage scientists
with the public. I hope to make it clear in this
Africa@home is an example of the unexpected
spin-offs of fundamental research. The origin of
the project can be traced to technologies developed
for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the flagship
particle accelerator project being developed
at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory
on the outskirts of Geneva. The storage and
analysis of the LHC data rely on Grid computing,
a technology that links major data centres together
worldwide, and which CERN and its institutional
partners have done much to develop.
In 2003, as a result of my responsibilities for
outreach activities in CERN’s IT Department, I
was approached with a request for some kind of
demonstration of Grid computing suitable for the
general public, as part of the 50th anniversary of
CERN in 2004. As it was not trivial at that stage
(or even today) to provide the general public with
access to the Grid infrastructure, I decided to investigate
possibilities for a project along the lines
of SETI@home, but which would be relevant to
the computing needs of the LHC. I teamed up
with a CERN colleague Ben Segal to work on this.
We discovered that the team behind SETI@home
was in the process of developing an open source
platform for volunteer computing called BOINC
(Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing).
BOINC was designed to enable scientists
to adapt their programs to run in a volunteer computing
environment. We also discovered that the
accelerator physicists at CERN, who simulate the
circulation of the proton beam in the LHC in order
to study the beam stability, were using a program
called Sixtrack that was well suited to volunteer
computing.
Thanks to the work of several talented students,
we managed to port the Sixtrack program to the
Africa@home (Small Grant) – Coordinator : Silvano de Gennaro
Africa@home : Volunteer Computing for Africa – Coordinator : Christian Pellegrini
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