Saturday, March 29, 2008

Laptops track Earth's shakes, rattles and rolls : Nature News

Laptops track Earth's shakes, rattles and rolls : Nature News: "A seismologist at Stanford University in California has developed a computer program for tracking earthquakes in real time. It uses thousands of volunteers' computers and may someday be fast enough to issue warnings just before an earthquake strikes.

“Our approach is just to have massive numbers.”

Quake-Catcher Network, as it's called, uses the accelerometers built into many new computers, which sense when a computer is dropped so that the hard drive can be shut down. But seismologist Jesse Lawrence found that the sensors could also pick up on more subtle movement. Thus was born the latest iteration in distributed computing, which turns the unused computing power of thousands of home computers into a giant supercomputer."

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