David Anderson wasn’t interested in the aliens. He was interested in a worldwide network of computers down here on Earth.
Anderson is a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1995, one of his grad students suggested they pool the processing power from personal computers across the globe and use this extra computing juice to track down extraterrestrial life. Anderson immediately embraced the idea though he couldn’t care less about ET.
“It captivated me,” Anderson says. “Not so much the particular scientific goal, but the idea of potentially using all of the computers in the world to work together on something. It was the grandest vision that one could think of.”
After quitting the startup he was involved with, he went to work on the open source software platform that would drive what became known as the SETI@home project. Dubbed the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, or BOINC, this platform let a world of volunteers donate their unused processing power to the task at hand, and by the late 1990s, it was running on more than a million machines, crunching data not only for SETI@Home but other projects as well.
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