Washington, Oct 25 : Scientists at the University of Illinois have designed a computing project that allows people from around the world to participate in cutting-edge cosmology research by donating their unused computing cycles.

The project, known as Cosmology@Home, is similar to the to SETI@Home project, a popular program that searches radio telescope data for evidence of extraterrestrial transmissions.

“When you run Cosmology@Home on your computer, it uses part of the computer's processing power, disk space and network bandwidth. Our goal is to search for cosmological models that describe our universe and agree with available astronomical and particle physics data,” said project leader Benjamin D. Wandelt, a professor of astronomy and of physics at Illinois.

Under the present scheme of things, participating computers would calculate the observable predictions of millions of theoretical models with different parameters.

The predictions would then be compared with actual data, including fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, large-scale distributions of galaxies, and the acceleration of the universe.

Wandelt said, in addition to picking out possible models, Cosmology@Home could also help design future cosmological observations.

It could also prepare for the analysis of future data sets, such as those to be collected by the Planck spacecraft, he said. (ANI)