Grid Meter » More extraterrestrial Grid efforts underway

January 17, 2006 | Comments: (0)

More extraterrestrial Grid efforts underway

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With the Stardust sample return capsule safely on the ground, NASA and researchers at the University of California at Berkeley are launching a new SETI-like Grid for analyzing the flotsam and jetsam retrieved from the farthest reaches of our solar system and beyond.

According to the release:

"Westphal and his colleagues at the Space Sciences Laboratory have created a 'virtual microscope' that will allow anyone with an Internet connection to scan some of the 1.5 million pictures of the aerogel for tracks left by speeding dust." So this is more a human ocular instrumentation Grid than the traditional computational and data Grids most frequently referenced.

To ensure that the volunteer scanners know what they're doing, each must pass a test where he or she is asked to find the track in a few test samples." And like a traditional Grid there appear to be methods of resource verification and monitoring and discovery of resources. Albeit a bit more manual a process than most Grid middleware would tout!

Like SETI@home, which is the world's largest computer, we hope Stardust@home will also be a large computer, though more of a neural network, using brains together to find these grains," said Bryan Mendez of the Center for Science Education at the Space Sciences Laboratory."

When it comes to the Grid, we're all just resources ...

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on January 17, 2006 07:17 AM

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