本帖最后由 超哥不郁闷 于 2013-8-20 21:24 编辑
原文链接： http://www.equn.com/wiki/Searching_for_E.T._and_the_Cure_for_Cancer:_The_Planetary_Society_Helps_Trigger_a_Computing_Revolution
文章简介：分布式计算与志愿计算的相关介绍
以下是我的初步翻译 ：
We couldn’t say no to the opportunity: being part of an experiment in which members of the public could truly contribute to science and have a chance to make a world-changing discovery. That’s what SETI@home promised when David Anderson and Dan Werthimer of UC Berkeley brought the project to The Planetary Society and asked for our help in getting it launched. With our members’ support, we leaped on it, and nearly six million participants later, SETI@home is a landmark in the history of scientific computing.
我们不能拒绝这个机会：成为让所有公众真正能够为科学做出贡献且有机会找到改变世界之发现的实验的一部分。那正是加州大学伯克利分校的David Anderson和Dan Werthimer将该项目提交给行星协会并寻求我们的帮助来发起该项目时SETI@home所承诺的。凭借我们成员的大力支持，我们投身其中，而且之后有了将近六百万的参与者，由此SETI@home成为了科学计算历史上的里程碑。
A prime reason we supported SETI@home was the project’s potential to advance the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), an endeavor intimately connected to The Planetary Society since our founding. But there was more to it than that. SETI@home would also pioneer a new mode of computing, in which packets of data would be distributed among a network of personal computers, creating a virtual supercomputer that could dramatically decrease the money and time scientists spend on knotty calculations.
我们支持SETI@home的首要原因是这个项目促进搜寻外星智能生命项目（SETI）的潜力，我们成立之时就密切地对行星协会进行援助。但有比那更有意义的事。SETI@home同样会开创一个新的计算模式，其中的任务包将会分发给联网的计算机，从而构建一个能够显著减少科学家在棘手计算上耗费资金与时间的虚拟超级计算机。
The potential for “spin-offs”—applications that serendipitously follow original research—was obvious from SETI@home’s birth, but moving from potential to reality is never guaranteed. One can only hope. In the case of SETI@home, that hope has been realized spectacularly.
“副产品”的潜力—最初研究之后偶然的应用—它很显然来自于SETI@home的诞生，但是将潜力转变为现实从来都不能保证。只要有希望，我们就全力以赴。由于有SETI@home，那些希望已经奇迹般地实现了。
In applications ranging from British television to video game consoles, SETI@home spin-offs just keep coming. Planetary Society members truly have helped pioneer new techniques in the conduct of science. Our initial investment has returned amazing results that will continue to deliver benefits over years to come.
在从电视机到电子游戏机上的应用，SETI@home的附属成果正在接踵而至。行星协会的成员真正地帮助开拓了科学方面的新技术。我们最初的投资得到了令人意想不到的成果，并且将会在接下来的多年里持续带来回报。
A Computing Quandary 计算的困境
Scientists conducting complex research projects depend on computers to help them process the masses of data collected by modern instruments. Existing computer technology has constraints: large and fast computers are expensive, and processing time on the few existing supercomputers is scarce. Research groups vie for the precious time available on each machine. Furthermore, some of the most intriguing scientific riddles involve calculations so elaborate and complex that they require not hours or days but years or even decades of computing time to resolve. If science was to make full use of the computing revolution in SETI research, a different approach would be needed.
科学家们在电脑上开展复杂的研究项目来帮助他们处理由现代设备收集到的繁杂数据。现有的计算机技术存在很多限制：庞大而快速的计算机非常昂贵，并且现有的少数超级计算机上的运行时间非常宝贵。研究团队争夺每台机器上的可得到的宝贵时间。与此同时，一些最复杂的问题所包含的计算过于复杂，以至于它们需要的不是几小时或几天的计算时间，而是需要几年甚至是几十年的时间去解决。如果科学本身要去充分利用SETI带来的计算革命，那么就需要一种截然不同的途径。
A solution arrived in unexpected form: the Internet. In the 1990s, millions of computers, isolated in offices and homes, became linked to one another through the magic of the World Wide Web. Suddenly, with the click of a mouse, users could instantaneously communicate across borders, continents, and oceans. Could this suddenly interconnected world make it possible for computers to join in pursuit of a scientific goal?
一种解决方法在意想不到的形式中形成了：那就是互联网。在上世纪90年代，办公室和家中的数百万台电脑通过万维网的神奇力量合而为一。突然间，凭借着鼠标的点击，用户就可以立即跨过国界、大洲以及大洋相互通讯。那么这个突然被联系起来的世界有可能让计算机们加入一个以科学为目标的工作中吗？
In 1995, in Berkeley, California, a group of scientists decided to find out. The idea, hatched by computer scientists David Anderson and David Gedye, along with SETI scientist Dan Werthimer, was brilliant in its simplicity. Most personal computers use only a fraction of their computing capacity, spending much of their time running screensavers. If those wasted processing CPUs and megabytes of computer memory could be harnessed to process the mass of data collected in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the resulting network would dwarf the computing power of the fastest supercomputer in existence. 1995年，在加州大学伯克利分校内，一群科学家决定去发现这个解决方法。这个想法是由计算机科学家David Anderson和David Gedye，以及SETI的科学家Dan Werthimer共同孕育的，他们都非常有想象力。大多数的个人电脑仅仅利用了其计算能力的很小一部分，而且大多数时间都在运行屏保程序。如果这些被浪费的CPU与内存资源能够被用来处理来自SETI的繁杂数据，那么现有最强大的超级计算机也会在它的面前相形见绌。
The Birth of Volunteer Computing 志愿计算的诞生
The idea was brilliant, but not one for which investors were willing to give money to develop. Anderson and Werthimer beat the bushes looking for startup funds, but aside from a few in-kind donations, no visionary sponsor stepped forward—until they called The Planetary Society. Using the Carl Sagan Fund for the Future and a donation from Paramount Pictures, we provided the first $100,000 needed to get the project under way.
这个想法非常杰出，但不是所有的投资者都愿意出钱来促使其发展。Anderson与Werthimer曾经在启动资金上打过赌，但是除了一些实物捐赠，再没有任何有远见的赞助者站出来——直到他们呼叫了行星协会。使用着卡尔·萨根未来基金与派拉蒙影业的捐款，我们终于凑齐了让该项目上路所需的第一笔100,000美元。
And so SETI@home was born. Launched in 1999, it became an international sensation. Within a few months, millions of personal computers were displaying the dynamic power bar graphics that have become the iconic image of SETI@home. It was a startling success on a scale that even the most optimistic of SETI@home’s founders never imagined. SETI@home users made possible the most sensitive search for extraterrestrial intelligence ever conducted; they also demonstrated the power and potential of volunteer computing. SETI@home became—by far—the largest and most powerful computer network ever assembled, accomplishing within months calculations that normally would have taken decades.
SETI@home由此诞生。其发起于1999年，它引起了一场国际性轰动。没有几个月，数百万台个人电脑展现了SETI@home的活力。该项目启动的巨大成功让那些即使是SETI@home中最为乐观的发起者都从未想象到。SETI@home的用户让那些最为敏感的搜寻外星智能生命项目成为可能；他们同样证明了志愿计算的力量与潜力。SETI@home成为迄今为止最大且能力最强的计算机网络，它在数月之内完成了一般需要数十年时间完成的计算。
Scientists in other fields quickly took note and searched for ways to take advantage of the remarkable resource. A Stanford University group trying to decipher the mysteries of protein folding thought their project was ideally suited for volunteer computing. Proteins are long strings of amino acids—the building blocks of life. To fulfill their functions, proteins cannot remain as simple strings, or “necklaces,” but need to fold into specific and complex shapes. One of the most amazing mysteries of life is that proteins perform that task reliably, efficiently, and quickly. Modeling this process on the atomic scale proved to be one of the most difficult challenges of computational biology. Resolving it not only would help scientists better understand the processes of life but also could help fight some of the most crippling diseases afflicting humanity—Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, BSE (“mad cow disease”), and certain types of cancer.
其他领域的科学家很快地学习并且寻找利用这些非凡资源的途径。斯坦福大学的一个小组尝试着去解开蛋白质折叠的奥秘，且他们的课题对于志愿计算来说非常适合。蛋白质是氨基酸构成的长链——它们是生命的基石。为了执行它们的功能，蛋白质不能像绳子或项链那样简单，而是需要折叠成特定且复杂的形态。生命最让人惊讶的谜题之一就是蛋白质执行任务时是那么地可靠,高效而且迅速。在原子尺度下给这一过程建模被证明是计算生物学中最为艰巨的挑战之一。该问题的解决不仅能帮助科学家们更好地理解生命的过程，还能够帮助抗击一些对人类来说最具威胁性的疾病——帕金森症,阿兹海默症,疯牛病以及某些类型的癌症。
The chief difficulty in simulating protein folding is time, explained Vijay S. Pande of Stanford University. Proteins fold on a time scale of microseconds (millionths of a second), but it takes an average computer about a day just to simulate the folding over a single nanosecond (one billionth of a second). At that rate, it would take almost three years to simulate a microsecond of folding and perhaps a decade or two of computer time to analyze the folding of a single protein. This is hardly a practical way to resolve the problem.
斯坦福大学的Vijay S. Pande解释说模拟蛋白质折叠的最主要的困难在于时间。蛋白质折叠在微秒级的尺度下进行（百万分之一秒），但那需要一台普通的计算机花费大约一天的时间去模拟仅仅一纳秒（即十亿分之一秒）的折叠过程。以那样的速度，那将会用去大概三年的时间去模拟一微秒的蛋白质折叠，也可能花费一二十年的计算时间去分析单个蛋白质的折叠。对于这个问题来说这几乎是个行不通的方法。
Then came SETI@home, and Pande and his colleagues took notice. Within a year, SETI@home had logged not a decade or two but millions of years of computer time. This kind of computing power would go far toward solving the difficulties in simulating protein folding. After a year designing their own volunteer computing platform, the Stanford group launched folding@home with spectacular results. Within two years, the project’s first scientific publication appeared in Nature. Although much of the long road to curing disease still lies ahead, as of this writing, the project has resulted in the publication of 49 peer-reviewed articles in established scientific journals.
之后SETI@home的到来引起了Pande和他同事们的注意。一年之内，SETI@home累计运行了不是一二十年而是数百万年的运算时间。这种计算能力将会使模拟蛋白质折叠的研究取得长足进步。在花费了一年时间设计他们自己的志愿计算平台之后，斯坦福大学的那个研究小组以让世人瞩目的成果发起了Folding@home。在两年之内，该项目的首个科研成果就发表在了《自然》杂志上。尽管前面还有很长的治疗顽症的道路要走，但是正如所写的那样，这个项目已经在权威的科学杂志上发表了49篇科学界认可的论文。
Folding@home has now reached beyond the community of PC users to volunteers in other regions of cyberspace. In late March, computer gamers using Sony’s PlayStation 3 were given the chance to combine entertainment with scientific research by running folding@home on their machines. More than 100,000 users downloaded the folding@home software within two days after it became available, with around 35,000 participating at any given time. The powerful processors at the heart of the game consoles are designed to conduct extremely fast calculations, 10 to 50 times faster than an ordinary personal computer. Thus, although PlayStation 3 consoles account for only one fifth of machines running folding@home, they account for two thirds of the project’s computing power.
Folding@home将不同信息空间的用户与志愿者的个人电脑连接起来。在3月的晚些时候，使用索尼PS3游戏机的玩家通过在他们的设备上运行Folding@home而被给予了将娱乐和科研相结合的机会。这个程序发布后，在不到两天的时间里就有超过100,000的用户下载了Folding@home的运算程序，有将近35,000名用户在任何给定的时间内持续运行该程序。游戏机核心处的强大处理器被设计成急速计算的机器，比普通的个人电脑要快10~50倍。因此，尽管PS3游戏机仅占所有运行Folding@home的机器的五分之一，但它们占据了该项目计算能力的三分之二。
The Birth of BOINC 伯克利分布式计算平台（BOINC）的诞生
Although both SETI@home and folding@home are highly successful and engage many thousands of people and machines around the world, the projects also exposed the limitations of the volunteer computing concept. Each research group, working separately, had to design its own project from scratch, write and test its own software, and purchase and maintain its own servers. This is a challenge even for computer scientists, not to mention for scientists in fields such as biology, physics, or medicine, who might have little knowledge of how to design and operate a computer network. Although both the Berkeley and the Stanford group succeeded in designing and maintaining their respective projects, as long as conducting a volunteer computing experiment was in itself a major feat of engineering, not many scientists would follow this road.
尽管SETI@home与Folding@home都取得了极大成功，并且吸引了来自世界各地成千上万的人及其设备，但是这两个项目仍然暴露了志愿计算这一理念的限制。每一个研究团队各自独立工作，必须从草拟,编写及测试自己的软件为开始，从而来设计自己的项目，并且得购买和维护自己的服务器。这对于计算机科学家来说都是一个挑战，暂且不说那些生物,物理及医药领域对于设计并操作电脑网络这方面知之甚少的科学家。尽管加州大学伯克利分校和斯坦福大学的研究小组在设计和维护他们那受人敬仰的项目上取得了成功，且他们也成功地进行了志愿计算的管理，但不会有很多科学家走上这条道路。
David Anderson, project director of SETI@home, thought he had a solution. What if volunteer computing was made easy and user-friendly? Then many reluctant research groups could take advantage of its remarkable potential. With this idea in mind, and with the experience of operating SETI@home, Anderson founded the Berkeley Online Infrastructure for Network Computing, known by its catchy acronym, BOINC.
David Anderson是SETI@home项目的主任，他认为自己有一个解决方法。如果志愿计算能够被做得简单且方便，那么将会发生什么？如果其能够实现，那么很多处境艰难的研究小组就可以从其非凡的潜力中获益。有了心中的这一想法以及实施SETI@home的经验，Anderson开发出了伯克利分布式计算平台，即广为人知的BOINC。
Unlike SETI@home or folding@ home, BOINC is not in itself a volunteer computing research project. It is, rather, an easy-to-use computer code available to anyone who wishes to launch such a project. With relatively minor modifications, the BOINC code can be used for projects in almost any field.
不同于SETI@home和Folding@home,BOINC其自身并不是一个志愿计算研究项目，而是一种任何想要发起研究项目的人都能够方便操作的电脑编码。凭借其相对较小的修改量，BOINC的代码几乎可以被所有领域的项目使用。
The project to lead the way in launching BOINC was SETI@home. In June 2004, users began downloading the BOINC version, which is more powerful and flexible than the original project. By the end of the year, SETI@home’s transition to BOINC was complete, and the project’s “classic” version shut down.
为BOINC的发起引路的项目正是SETI@home。在2004年6月，用户们开始下载BOINC上的版本，它比原先的版本更为强大和灵活。在那一年结束时，将SETI@home移植到BOINC上的工作彻底完成，原先的“classic"版本也彻底弃用。
SETI@home’s conversion was an important milestone because BOINC allows PC users to run more than one project easily on their machines. Any volunteer can, for example, decide to run SETI@home 70 percent of the time and a biology project the other 30 percent. As a result, SETI@home’s legions of users are available for other BOINC projects that are just starting out.
SETI@home的转变是一个重要的里程碑，因为BOINC允许PC用户更加容易地在他们的设备上运行多个项目。任何志愿者都可以，比如说决定用70%的时间来运行SETI@home，再用另外30%的时间运行一个生物学项目。因此，SETI@home为数众多的用户就可以接触到BOINC上其他开始了的项目。
Soon after, numerous other projects launched their own BOINC programs. Among them was predictor@home, run from the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. Like folding@home, it investigates protein folding, but whereas the Stanford project attempts to determine the sequence of foldings over time, predictor@home focuses on the internal architecture of the folded protein. Two other BOINC projects use distributed computing to decipher the structure of proteins: Rosetta@home, out of the University of Washington, and Proteins@home, based at the Ecole Polytechnique in France.
不久之后，其他无数的项目方发布了他们自己的BOINC程序。Predictor@home就是其中之一，它是由位于圣迭戈的美国斯克利普斯研究所发起的。就像Folding@home，它也是研究蛋白质的折叠，但是斯坦福大学的研究项目在于试图弄清蛋白质折叠全过程的顺序，而Predictor@home则专注于已折叠蛋白质的内在结构。另外的两个BOINC项目则利用分布式计算尝试去破译蛋白质的构造：Rosetta@home，一个由华盛顿大学发起的项目，而Proteins@home则是由法国巴黎综合理工学院发起。
Altogether, according to David Anderson, 40 different projects have now joined the BOINC family and use its brand of volunteer computing. Primegrid.com is a privately run mathematical project that searches for very large prime numbers and has already found more than 100 new primes. Einstein@home is based at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and searches for pulsars in the sky based on data from the gravitational wave detectors LIGO and GEO. LHC@home simulates the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator being built at the CERN facility in Geneva, the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. By simulating particles traveling through the accelerator, LHC@home helps with the extremely precise design required for the LHC. 总的来说，据David Anderson透露，现在已有40个不同的项目加入到了BOINC的大家庭中来，并利用着其志愿计算的力量。Primegrid.com是一个独立运营的数学项目，其寻找着非常大的质数，并且已经发现了100多个新的质数。Einstein@Home由密尔沃基的威斯康星大学发起，其通过处理来自引力波探测器LIGO与GEO的数据来寻找天空中的脉冲星。LHC@home则用来模拟欧洲大型强子对撞机（一个建造在日内瓦欧洲核子研究中心的粒子加速器，同时也是世界上最大的高能物理实验室）。通过模拟粒子在加速器内的运动，LCH@home帮助LCH寻找其所需要的极为精确的设计。
The BBC Comes on Board BBC接踵而至
The most popular and high-profile project, except for SETI@home itself, is climateprediction.net, a BOINC project based at Oxford University and the Open University in the United Kingdom. As its name indicates, climateprediction.net investigates one of today’s most pressing concerns for both science and public policy: Earth’s future climate.
除了SETI@home之外最受欢迎,最备受瞩目的项目当属climateprediction.net了，这是一个由英国牛津大学与开放大学共同建立的一个项目。正如它的名字显示的那样，climateprediction.net研究着当今科学界与民众界最为密切关注的问题之一：地球未来的气候。
“It all began,” explained Co-Principal Investigator Bob Spicer of the Open University, “in the late 1990s when Myles Allen of Oxford noticed the SETI@home screen-saver on a colleague’s computer.” After the concept was explained to him, he began to wonder, “Would it be possible to model the Earth’s climate in this way?”
“这一切才刚刚开始”，开放大学的副首席科学家Bob Spicer解释说，“在上世纪90年代末期，来自牛津大学的Myles Allen注意到了一个同事电脑上的SETI@home屏保。”在概念被解释清楚后，他便开始发问：“有可能用这种方式来模拟地球的气候环境吗？”
It wasn’t easy. Climate models are extremely complex, dividing Earth’s surface into small square regions, then dividing these in turn into separate layers of the atmosphere. The model operates over time, taking into account such factors as the increasing effect of human-generated greenhouse gases that can heat up Earth and sulfur that cools the planet by blocking sunlight.
那并不容易。气候模型极为复杂，其将地球表面分成方形的区域，之后再将其转变成大气层中分隔开的气层。这个模型时时刻刻都要运作，并要将诸如影响日益增大的能使地球升温的人造温室气体，以及能够抵挡住阳光从而使地球降温的硫磺等因素考虑在内。
Then there’s the effect of the oceans, which account for around 50 percent of any climate change. To further complicate things, the atmosphere and the oceans operate on different time scales: the atmosphere can respond to climate change factors in a matter of days, but the oceans can take centuries to change their patterns. All this makes for a very challenging computational exercise requiring the most advanced and fastest computational resources available.
还有海洋的影响，其能够解释50%的气候变化。如果让事情进一步复杂，那么就得考虑大气层与海洋在不同时间层面上作用的这一点:大气层可以在大约几天之内对气候变化因素做出反应，但是海洋则要用几个世纪的时间来改变它们的模式。所有这一切造就了一个需要汇集可得到的最先进且最快速的计算资源才能够解决的挑战。
In September 2003, Allen, Spicer, and their colleagues launched climateprediction.net. The first version was simplified and did not account for the oceans. It took on the easier problem of determining what effect a doubling of the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere would have on Earth’s climate. Even simplified, climateprediction.net was already doing better than competing models: by January 2005, when the first article appeared in Nature, climateprediction.net had run 2,570 simulations of Earth’s climate, compared with only 127 by the supercomputer at the Met Office, the British government agency responsible for monitoring weather and climate.
在2003年9月，Allen,Spicer和他们的同事创立了climateprediction.net。最初的版本是被简化了的，其并没有考虑到海洋的因素。它考虑的是大气层中的二氧化碳（CO2)对地球大气的影响。即便被简化了，climateprediction.net依然比竞争模型要好：到了2005年1月，当第一篇论文出现在《自然》杂志上时，climateprediction.net已经将地球气候模拟了2,570次，与之相比，位于英国气象局（英国政府专门用来监测天气与气候变化的机构）的超级计算机仅仅模拟了127次。
In the second stage of the project, Oxford and the Open University were joined by a surprising new partner: the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Eager to engage the public in the debate over climate change, the BBC was planning a series of documentaries on global warming and its effect, due to air in 2006. It offered to make climateprediction.net an integral part of its plans, promote it in its documentaries, and invite the public to take part. It was an offer that Allen, Spicer, and their colleagues could not pass up.
在这个项目的第二阶段中，牛津大学与开放大学迎来了一个意想不到的新成员：英国广播公司（BBC）。为了让公众热切地关注气候变化，BBC计划了一系列根据2006年气候数据制作而成的反映气候变暖问题的纪录片。它将climateprediction.net列入其完整的计划之中，来在其纪录片中推广climateprediction.net，并邀请公众加入其中。那是一个Allen,Spicer和他们的同事不容错过的机遇。
The new version of climateprediction.net, also known as “the BBC experiment,” was far more complex than the earlier one. A realistic ocean was now an integral part of the model, and rather than compare distinct states (current levels of CO2 vs. double those levels), the program followed the evolution of the climate by tracking the contributing factors. Unlike the early version, the new climateprediction.net was a member of the BOINC family.
新版本的climateprediction.net,即众所周知的“BBC试验”，其要比原先的版本复杂得多。一个实际中的海洋现在成为了该模型必要的部分，而不是单纯比较不同的情形（现在的CO2水平VS于其两倍的水平），该程序通过追踪有作用的因素来实时跟踪气候的变化。不同于原先的版本，新的climateprediction.net成为了BOINC大家庭中的一员。
The BBC, meanwhile, did its part. To inaugurate the project in February 2006, it aired an hour-long documentary, titled Meltdown, on climate change. The documentary invited people to take part in the BBC experiment, and the project was an overnight hit. Within 10 days of the airing of Meltdown, 100,000 people in 143 countries had downloaded the software and were running climateprediction.net on their computers. Within a month, that number had doubled.
与此同时，BBC做了它自己的工作。它在2006年2月开创了该项目，并播送了一部关于气候变化的以《Meltdown》为题的长达1小时的纪录片。该纪录片邀请人们加入到BBC试验中来，该项目便因此火了起来。在播放《Meltdown》的十天当中，有来自143个国家的100,000个人下载了该软件，并在他们的电脑上运行climateprediction.net。一个月之内，这个数字就翻了一倍。
According to Spicer, climateprediction.net demands far more of a computer than does SETI@home. A typical PC can process a SETI@home work unit in a few days, but completing a single climateprediction.net simulation could take months. Nevertheless, by the end of 2006, more than 50,000 simulations had been completed and sent back to the project’s headquarters. To mark the completion of the BBC experiment, the network aired another documentary, titled Climate Change: Britain Under Threat, hosted by respected British broadcaster David Attenborough.
根据Spicer所说，climateprediction.net比SETI@home对单台电脑的要求更高。一台典型的PC处理SETI@home的任务单元要用去数天时间，但是完成一次climateprediction.net的模拟则要用去几个月的时间。尽管如此，到了2006年末，就有多于50,000次的模拟被完成并被返回到该项目的总部。为了表彰其贡献，BBC又推出了另一部以《气候变化：英国正受威胁》为题的纪录片，其由受人尊敬的英国广播员大卫·爱登堡配音。
Although the BBC’s involvement has ended for now, climateprediction.net is still going strong. Its ultimate goal is to run several million simulations to fully explore the effects of all 23 parameters included in the model. “This is genuine science that cannot be done any other way,” said Spicer. “It uses a state-of-the-art model, and it feeds into an ongoing public debate.”
尽管BBC现在已经没有参与其中，但是climateprediction.net依旧在壮大。它的终极目标是运行数百万次的模拟来全面地揭示该模型中所有23种参数的影响。“这是一个只能够用这种方式解决的真正的科学问题”，Spicer如是说，“它运用着一个艺术品般的模型，同时也被公众不停地讨论着。”
The Future 展望未来
SETI@home and climateprediction.net offer glimpses of the power and potential of volunteer computing. This technique is providing projects with enormous computing resources and connects science with the public in ways never before possible. Projects such as climateprediction.net, said Bob Spicer, “give members of the public a sense of ownership of a genuine scientific project, in which they fully participated.” Volunteer computing is what makes it all possible.
SETI@home和climateprediction.net部分显示了志愿计算的的力量与潜力。这种技术给科研项目提供了无数的计算资源，并且前所未有地将科学与公众联系起来。对于climateprediction.net这样的项目，Bob Spicer如是说：“它们给了公众一种亲身参与真正科研项目的感觉，他们全身心地投入其中。”志愿计算将这一切变成了可能。
Anderson is still looking for ways to improve volunteer computing, including expansion into the computer gaming world. Although he considers this a promising direction, most projects are not as compatible with game consoles as is folding@home. For example, climateprediction.net will never run on a PlayStation 3, Anderson explained, because it requires too much memory. Projects like SETI@home probably can run on a game console, though the improvement over conventional computers will likely not be as spectacular is it was for folding@home. Nevertheless, Anderson and his team are in discussions with Sony about launching a PlayStation 3 version of BOINC.
Anderson仍在寻找改进志愿计算的方法，包括将其扩展到电子游戏领域。尽管他认为这是一个有前途的发展方向，但是绝大多数的项目并不能像Folding@home那样很好地与游戏机兼容。例如climateprediction.net永远不会在PS3上运行，Anderson解释说因为那需要太多的内存。像SETI@home那样的项目有可能在一台游戏机上运行，尽管相对于在传统电脑上运行，这种方式取得了进步，但或许这么做并没有像当年Folding@home采取这种方式时那么让世人瞩目。尽管如此，Anderson和他的团队仍在与索尼公司商谈发布PS3版BOINC的相关事宜。
BOINC boasts 40 different distributed computing projects, but Anderson is far from satisfied. He has estimated that “ninety-nine percent of scientists who could profit from volunteer computing are only dimly aware of BOINC’s existence.” The reasons, he suggested, are not so different from those that prompted BOINC in the first place: scientists in other fields are rarely knowledgeable about computer science, and their IT (information technology) experts often want to retain control of a project, which is not always possible with this new approach. As a result, volunteer computing is rarely considered by researchers.
BOINC拥有40种不同的分布式计算项目，但是这一切远未让Anderson满意。据他估计“99%的可以从志愿计算中获益的科学家都只是依稀地知道BOINC的存在。”他所说的那些原因与那些让BOINC成为首选的原因没有太大差别：其他领域的科学家对计算机科学知之甚少，并且他们的IT专家总是想去拥有一个项目的控制权，但是在分布式计算这种新的方式中这一点并不总是可能的。因此，志愿计算很少被研究人员纳入考虑范围之中。
To overcome these barriers, Anderson is proposing what he calls “virtual campus supercomputing centers” in universities. They would be university-wide volunteer computing centers that would offer hosting services and technical advice to any research group in search of computing resources. The centers would seek out researchers who could make use of their services. A university could appeal to its alumni and ask them to contribute time on their computers to benefit the virtual computing center. Graduates eager to remain part of their alma mater’s community and contribute to its scientific prowess would be happy to oblige.
为了克服这些障碍，Anderson提出了在大学中建立“校园超级计算中心”的概念。它们将会成为大学范围内的志愿计算中心，为任何寻求计算资源的研究团队提供主机服务及技术建议。这些中心的人员将会挑选出能够充分利用他们服务的研究者。大学可以吸引它们的学生并让他们将电脑的计算时间贡献给计算中心。久而久之，这种热情会在校园里传播开来，大家也会乐于为科学做出贡献。
Anderson takes heart from the success of the “World Community Grid”—an IBM-run program that hosts and runs volunteer computing operations for selected scientific projects. In Anderson’s vision, the virtual computing supercomputer center will do much the same but on a grander scale. In the future, he hopes, each university campus will have its own center. Somewhere down the line, Anderson believes, a tipping point will be reached, and distributed computing projects will become so common that they will always be considered as a viable option for complex and time-consuming calculations. Then the volunteer computing revolution will be complete.
Anderson从World Community Grid（IBM公司主持并运营的有多种志愿计算项目的程序）的成功之中获得了启发。在Anderson眼中，校园超级计算中心会有更多的用武之地。他希望将来每一所大学都能拥有自己的计算中心。Anderson相信这个转折点终将到来，分布式计算项目将会变得非常普及，以至于它们将总会被认为是一个能够切实可行地解决复杂耗时之计算的方法。届时，志愿计算的革命就会完成。
What of SETI@home, the granddaddy of them all? Eight years after its launch and three years after its conversion to BOINC, the project is still going strong. With hundreds of thousands of users, it accounts for about half of BOINC volunteers. Nowadays, explains Chief Scientist Dan Werthimer, thanks to a new multibeam receiver at Arecibo Observatory and the project’s increased computing power, SETI@home is more powerful and more sensitive than ever before. 那么它们的鼻祖SETI@home现在如何了呢？在它发起八年并移植到BOINC的3年之后，这个项目依然在壮大。它拥有数十万的用户，而这些用户大概占了BOINC志愿者的一半之多。今天，首席科学家Dan Werthimer解释说多亏了阿雷西博望远镜上新的无线电接收装置以及该项目持续增长的计算能力，SETI@home变得前所未有的强大与灵敏。
As ever more projects follow the path it blazed for volunteer computing and public participation in science, SETI@home continues patiently in its course, crunching data and seeking that signal from outer space. Somewhere in the vast globe-spanning SETI@home network, the elusive sign from E.T. could still be waiting to be discovered.
随着比以往更多的项目和公众加入，SETI@home依旧耐心地研究着自己的课题，搜寻并处理着那些来自外层空间的信息。在全球广阔的SETI@home计算网络中，某处一定存在着来自外星生命的等待着我们去发现的难得讯息。
Was our investment worth it? How can anyone say no? SETI@home and its spin-offs demonstrate The Planetary Society’s faith in the future and our belief that by pursuing discovery and understanding of the universe, we can make this small world of ours a better one. Be proud that you helped make it happen. 我们的研究值得吗？有谁能说不值得呢？SETI@home和它的附属成果证明了行星协会对未来的信任，以及我们对于持续探索并了解宇宙的信念，我们能让这个小小的世界变得更加美好。为自己让这一切发生而感到自豪吧。
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发表于 2013-8-20 17:36:40
发表于 2013-8-20 21:03:47
，我想在今明两天把它转移过去，不然大家的译文就会这样一直放着，不能将其作用最大化。。。请求指示~
