DEC 4, 2006 - QMC@HOME is another in a growing arsenal of distributed computing science projects running under the BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) interface. If you saw my July 5, 2004 or January 31, 2005 WOW award and review columns, you've already been introduced to BOINC and a couple of especially commendable BOINC projects, which harness millions of PCs to use their otherwise wasted computational power to work on such projects as the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and the search for gravitational waves. If you'd like to enroll your PC in one of these projects, be sure to take a look at QMC@HOME, which aims to help test and develop the Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) method of approximating quantum chemical reactions. It's a worthwhile project, and it will cost you nothing to let your PC contribute: the BOINC interface and QMC@HOME software are free to download and use, and you can set up your BOINC project(s) to run only when your computer is inactive. (You can run several such projects on the same machine. They all have decent-looking screensavers as a bonus.)
