The largest telescope ever to exist is the proposed Square Kilometre Array but with a sticker price of $2.1BN, researchers are hoping to cut costs by using distributed computing to leverage personal computer power in lieu of extremely expensive petaflop supercomputers.

The SETI Institute is launching a private beta test beginning today of SetiQuest Explorer in the hopes that hobby astronomers will help with pattern recognition tasks that can't be done well by computers. "We want to tap into the brain power of the world," Jill Tarter, director of the non-profit SETI Institute, said in an interview in her office this week.

A new book of essays explores the emerging fourth paradigm of science, which is partly a response to the flood of data generated by the last paradigm shift: computational science. The new generation of researchers are creating new computing tools to manage, visualize and analyze the data flood and in the process fundamentally transforming the practice of science.

The falling price of supercomputers and rising prominence of "cloud computing" is pulling down the high walls around computing-intensive research. A result could be a democratization that gives ordinary people with a novel idea a chance to explore their curiosity with heavy computing firepower — and maybe find something unexpected.

In October, a small team of Silicon Valley researchers plans to turn software originally designed to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life to the task of looking for evidence of artificial life generated on a cluster of high-performance computers.

A new distributed computing project, the EvoGrid, hopes to enlist millions of volunteers to use their desktop computers to power a simulation that can determine how life emerged from the primordial soup.

Nathan Eagle, a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, in New Mexico, is launching a project similar to Amazon's Mechanical Turk but that distributes tasks via cell phones. The goal of his project, called txteagle, is to leverage an underused work force in some of the poorest parts of the world.

IBM today announced that it is teaming up with Harvard University to launch a new worldwide grid project aimed at finding ways to make solar energy cheaper and more efficient.

David Anderson, founder of the popular distributed computing network BOINC (which runs SETI@Home and several other projects) discusses how disributed computing efforts could achieve the current goal of high-performance computing: an exaFLOP (floating point operations per second) or 1,000 times the current standard of a PetaFLOP.

Earthquake researchers in California hope to take advantage of the motion sensors in laptops to create an earthquake-sensing network. By putting computers in homes and businesses to work as seismic monitors, the researchers hope to pull together a wealth of information on major quakes, and perhaps even offer early warnings, giving a few seconds' notice of a potentially devastating quake.