Content about volunteer computing

Feature - BOINC gets social with Facebook

A screen shot of Progress Thru Processors.

For the first time, Facebook users are signing on to volunteer grid computing, thanks to a new application called Progress thru Processors.
“For all the promise of volunteer computing, the problem is that no one’s ever heard of it,” said Matt Blumberg, executive director of Grid Republic, “and that’s a big deal for a technology where the utility of the thing is a function of the number of people who participate.”
Progress thru Processors could change all that. The project was developed jointly by Intel, Grid Republic, and the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. BOINC, which was originally created at University of California at Berkeley to assist in analyzing data in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), is the platform on which Grid Republic’s software is based. Progress thru Processors is an adaptation of Grid Republic’s so

Feature - Conserving bio-diversity at Peru’s CIP

A few of the many varieties of potatoes. CIP maintains the world’s largest genetic bank of potatoes, including 1500 samples of 100 wild species collected in eight Latin American countries, as well as samples of 3800 traditional Andean cultivated potatoes. The collection is maintained under the auspices of the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization, and is available to plant breeders worldwide free upon request. (Click to enlarge.) Image courtesy International Potato Center

What do the objects at right have in common?
They’re all potatoes.
And their continuing variety will be partly because of the grid.The International Potato Center (known by its Spanish acronym, CIP) seeks to ensure the genetic diversity of this staple food crop. The organization also seeks to reduce poverty and achieve food security on a sustained basis in developing countries through scientific research and related activities —

Feature - Volunteer computing against childhood cancer

Image courtesy of WCG.

Researchers from the Chiba Cancer Center Research Institute and Chiba University in Japan are launching a new World Community Grid project with IBM to discover a drug treatment for neuroblastoma, the most common cause of death in children with solid tumors. Help Fight Childhood Cancer, as the project is known, uses idle computational power from volunteers’ home and office computers to identify promising drug candidates.Most physicians believe that neuroblastoma is caused by accidental cell growth that occurs during normal development of the sympathetic ganglia and adrenal glands. This condition occurs most often the first two years of life, and poses a high risk for disease relapse with survival rates under 40 percent.The new Help Fight Childhood Cancer project uses volunteered computational power to identify which of the three million potential drug candidates prohibit growth of three proteins, TrkB, AL

Feature - Volunteer computing goes East Image courtesy of Asia@home. The year 2009 marks the tenth anniversary of the launch of SETI@home, a program that uses spare capacity on ordinary PCs and laptops to analyze data from radiotelescopes in search of elusive signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI@home was downloaded by millions and launched a wave of science projects that rely on volunteer computing.  In April, a workshop in Taipei and a seminar in Beijing, both under the banner of Asia@Home, aim to raise awareness among scientists in Asia of the huge – and so far largely unexploited – potential of such volunteer computing for science projects in their region. Inspired by the success of SETI@home, over 50 volunteer computing projects now use an open source software platform called BOINC, devised by the director of SETI@Home, David Anderson of the University of California at Berkeley. These projects include everything from LHC@home for simulating beam dynamics of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to MalariaC

Fight AIDS at home, via unused computer time World Community Grid is helping “FightAIDS@Home” by completing computational calculations related to molecular structures of potential anti-HIV drugs..  Image courtesy of World Community Grid Starting on World AIDS Day on 1 December, the World Community Grid will sponsor a month-long challenge via its FightAIDS@home project, with the goal of increasing the number of computers and computer cycles available to researchers conducting HIV/AIDS research.Like all molecules, HIV—the virus that causes AIDS—is dependent upon its three-dimensional shape to attack the human immune system, in much the same way that a key must fit into a lock in order to gain entry. If the lock can be blocked—with a drug, for example—then the key cannot fit, and the virus is prevented from maturing. Such blockers, known as “protease inhibitors,” are one way of avoiding the onset of AIDS.Researchers have been able to determine by trial-and-error the shapes of a

Feature - Catching quakes with laptops The interactive program built around the BOINC screensaver, designed for classroom activities.  Recent earthquakes and sites of major historic earthquakes are indicated; information about these events can be retrieved by clicking on them. Image courtesy of the Quake Catcher Network project. Inside your laptop is a small accelerometer chip, there to protect the delicate moving parts of your hard disk from sudden jolts. It turns out that the same chip is a pretty good earthquake sensor, too—especially if the signals from lots of them are compared, in order to filter out more mundane sources of laptop vibrations, such as typing. It’s an approach that is starting to gain acceptance. The project Quake Catcher Network (QCN), already has about 1500 laptops connected in a network that has detected several tremors, including a magnitude 5.4 quake in Los Angeles in July. Led by Elizabeth Cochran at the University of California, Riverside, and Jesse Lawrence at Stanford University, QCN u

  Opinion - Reaching for the Exa-scale, with volunteer computing Over the last few years, GPUs green) and CPUs (blue) have increased exponentially in speed, but the doubling time for GPUs has been about 8 months, while it has taken 16 months for CPUsImage courtesy of NVIDIA (Editor's note: David Anderson is the founder of the popular volunteer computing platform known as BOINC, or the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. Here, he peers into his crystal ball to predict the direction of volunteer computing, especially as new, high-speed graphics processing units come into the market.)Remember your prefixes? Kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta . . . exa? Each denoting a thousand times more than the one before? Today, the average personal computer can do a few GigaFLOPS (the acronym refers to doing one billion FLoating-point Operations Per Second). A modest cluster might do one thousand GigaFLOPS, or 1 TeraFLOPS. And for several years, one thousand TeraFLOPS, or one PetaFLOPS, was the Holy Grail

Link of the week - UCLA finds first Mersenne Prime over 10 million digits Image courtesy of mersenne.org On August 23rd, a UCLA computer discovered the 45th known Mersenne prime, 243,112,609 – 1, a mammoth 12,978,189 digit number! The prime number qualifies for the Electronic Frontier Foundation 's $100,000 award for discovery of the first 10 million digit prime number. Congratulations to Edson Smith, who was responsible for installing and maintaining the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) software on the UCLA Mathematics Department's computers.— www.mersenne.orgEdson Smith, a system administrator in the Mathematics department at UCLA, says congratulations are due the entire UCLA Mathematics Computing Group. On behalf of the group, he responds to a number of questions about Mersenne Primes and the award via a FAQ.  His page is non-technical; all you have to know is that a Prime Number is evenly divisible only by itself and the number 1.Here's a teaser... but do read the FAQ; it's worth

Link of the week - Virtual reconstitution of a prairie Image courtesy of MCS@UH Researchers at the University of Houston in the U.S. and the University of Rennes in France are collaborating on the Virtual Prairie project (ViP), to study the effects of management practices on plant competition and genetic structure of the prairie. Their work may eventually contribute to the design of prairies with high agronomical value and the preservation of ecological systems with high biodiversity.  Using BOINC, hundreds of people from around the world have contributed computer time for the 22 million simulations the team completed in July. In a letter to their “Virtual Prairie Explorers”, the joint Houston-Rennes team reports the completion of phase 1, the modeling of an individual plant. “Basically we show that for achieving the best growth, there is no single optimum in plants but rather multiple strategies,” the authors write. “This would explain why some natural prairies are composed of species of

Feature - World Community Grid to Tackle Rice Crisis IBM and researchers at the University of Washington launched a new programon World Community Grid, a humanitarian research effort,  to developstronger strains of rice that could produce crops with larger and morenutritious yields. Image courtesy of the University of Washington. As concerns of a global hunger crisis mount, researchers at the University of Washington, Seattle, have launched a new program on IBM’s World Community Grid to develop stronger strains of rice that could produce crops with larger, more nutritious yields and greater resistance to changing weather patterns. Jumpstarted by a $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the “Nutritious Rice for the World” program will harness over 160 teraflops of the grid’s volunteer-donated processing power to study rice at the atomic level.  Researchers expect the results to transfer to other cereal crops such as corn, wheat, and barley and to have a major impact on global hea

Link of the week - The world’s most powerful computer? Luis von Ahn explains some brilliantly simple ways of harnessing the human mind for sophisticated computing.Image courtesy of Google engEDU, larger version onlineLuis Von Ahn thinks he could build the Empire State Building in 6.8 hours, or the Panama canal in less than a day. King of the CAPTCHA, Von Ahn’s research interests include encouraging people to work for free, catching cheaters online, and exploiting the parasitic relationship he says humans have with computers. “Tasks like image recognition are trivial for humans, but continue to challenge even the most sophisticated computer programs,” Von Ahn writes. “This talk introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve.” Where many of us would turn to new and sophisticated software, Von Ahn thinks we each come pre-packaged with the software—and, it seems, the time—to perhaps even change the world.

Link of the week - B.U.R.P This animation, intended to run in slow motion, was rendered using BURP, a project that uses BOINC software to gather spare CPU cycles in to a working professional-grade render farm.Animation by Schosch ProductionsBURP—or the Big and Ugly Rendering Project—is an alpha-phase project using BOINC-powered distributed computing to create a large, shared and publicly accessible render farm for generating 3D animations. The BURP render farm will be powered by its participants: artists who contribute their spare CPU cycles can themselves benefit from distributed access to the farm of spare cycles contributed by colleagues. The result? Professional, computer-generated rendering from your desktop, without the need to invest in expensive specialist equipment: animations that would take months to render on a single CPU can be completed in just days, and for a fraction of the price.The BURP Web site went online on 17 June 2004 and the project has since worked its way through several test phas