Content about volunteer computing

When a malaria vaccine becomes available, it could be effective to vaccinate people of all ages in low transmission areas in addition to the plans to vaccinate only infants in high transmission areas, according to a Swiss team that ran simulations using malariacontrol.net, a popular volunteer computing project.

The LHC is one of the biggest, most complex machines in the world. And physicists are reviving the volunteer computing project Sixtrack, part of LHC@Home, to design the 2020 upgrade.

It is a characteristic of our culture that we glorify scientific genius. Galileo Galilei, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking are just a few of the illustrious names from the canon of physics saints. Other disciplines have their own haloed ones. The role of the amateur scientist, in comparison with these greats, seems to vanish into insignificance.

Yet the future of science is the age of the amateur: the Internet will affect science in the same way it affected journalism, argues François Grey, the coordinator of the Citizen Cyberscience Center at CERN.

Anyone - anywhere - can now donate their own computers to help theoretical physicists at CERN calculate what the huge experiments using the LHC should be looking for in their data, with a new project called Test4Theory as part of LHC@Home.

Link of the Week: Einstein@home bags a pulsar

Albert Einstein (c) Camera Press, K. of Ottawa

The Einstein@Home volunteer computing project, run on the BOINC platform to run distributed computing projects, usually   searches for gravity waves. (See previous iSGTW article.) However, a side project spotted a rare pulsar in radio observatory data.Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars; their rapid rotation causes the emission from the poles to sweep across the line-of-sight to the Earth, creating a periodic flash. Initially, most pulsars are energetic, rotating rapidly and emitting radiation in the X-ray region. But, over time, they “spin down;” many only emit at the frequency of radio waves.This summer, a person at a home computer spotted PSR J2007+2722, later confirmed by ground-based observatories.An article in the journal Science praised the efforts of citizen scientists, saying that “This result demonstrates the capability of 'consumer' comput

Link of the Week: Live from the CCS

Image courtesy e-Science Talk

Last week, from 2 to 3 September, GridCast headed over to the Citizen Cyberscience Summit, held at Kings College London, to find out all the latest about volunteer computing.Their team of bloggers was on hand throughout the meeting to get the lowdown on the use of volunteer computing in everything from protein folding to searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Highlights include: 
• David Anderson, director of the SETI@home project, Space Sciences Laboratory, UC Berkeley;
• George Dyson, historian and philosopher of science and author of Darwin Among The Machines;
• Myles Allen, head of ClimatePrediction.net at Oxford University.But that’s not all! Take a look at more videos, photos and discussion from last week’s summit at the GridCast blog, especially François Grey’s thoughts on the event in this podcast.
 

Link of the Week - A new twist on summer camp: computing classes in the wild

Image courtesy Carlos Jaime-Barrios Hernandez

We’ve all heard of summer camp.But SuperComputing Camp (or SSCAMP, as it is known by its acronym in Spanish) is a little different.
Starting on the 15th of August, 46 undergraduates and masters students will learn about high performance computing, grid computing, volunteer computing and cloud computing — while staying in a hacienda near Panachi National Wildlife Park, just outside the small town of Piedecuesta, Colombia.The organizer, Carlos Jaime-Barrios Hernandez, says the idea is for students to learn in a natural environment, where they can explore and enjoy the great outdoors while having access to fully up-to-date facilities, including digital resources, projectors and live-video feeds to keynote speeches and online lectures. They will remotely connect to the grid infrastructure via the web. Hernandez — a research scient

Feature - Volunteer computing helps rescue oiled Gulf Coast wildlife

Map indicating position fo Deepwater Horizon oil spill as of June 8, and globally important bird areas considered most at risk. Image courtesy American Bird Conservancy. Click on image to enlarge.

iPhone users who come upon oiled birds and other wildlife in the Gulf Coast region can immediately transmit the location and a photo to animal rescue networks using a free new iPhone application called MoGO (Mobile Gulf Observatory). It was developed by four University of Massachusetts-Amherst researchers to make it easier for the public to help save wildlife exposed to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. With support from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the UMass-Amherst researchers hope the MoGO app will draw on the large network of “citizen scientists” who are as heartbroken as they are to witness the disaster for marine life, and who are actively looking for ways to help save wildlife along

Opinion - Volunteering for a better world: harnessing technology and willing citizens

Firefly in the daytime. Image courtesy Museum of Science, Boston.

By using the strengths of distributed computing technologies, both specialized researchers and citizens have the opportunity to participate in a new way of doing science.
We live in a time when nearly all information is available to nearly all people everywhere.
We are entering an age where all types of people can also contribute to many types of information. A school bus driver in rural Romania may be part of a biomedical research project. Or a banker in Los Angeles might moonlight as a collaborator in an astronomy project – classifying galaxies in her spare time.
This new movement in science, called “citizen science,” allows non-specialist volunteers to participate in global research. The projects are as diverse as backyard insect counts (the Firefly citizen science project), studies of how malaria develops and