BOINC
I have blogged thought I had blogged about the Berkely Open Infrastructure Networked Computing (BOINC) Project before, but it appears I haven’t.The BBC ran a big project on the network called “ClimatePrediction.net.” When your computer is turned on, the program uses either your processor when it’s ‘idle’ or you can configure it to use a percentage even while your working to process data. This data is downloaded from a central respository, and there are thousands of computers connected all doing their own little bit.
As you can imagine, hiring on of the big IBM machines to run such experiments isn’t an option, so along with Google’s clusters, BOINC aims to give organisations that wouldn’t have the chance of accessing such high computational power the chance – by letting the people choose.
If you download BOINC, you can choose what projects you want to help with. Me, being a geek, first got on board with the SETI@Home project, which was originally an independent distributed network – but due to it’s success spawned BOINC.
BOINC has been going for a few years now, and it’s something I’ve been dipping in and out of since it first began.
One of the projects I’ve been interested in (and contributing time to) was the Protein Folding Experiment. I got an email off the administrator today:
In the period before the summer, more than 15,000 volunteers participated in the Proteins@Home project. I would like to thank all of you for your overwhelming support. My warm thanks also go to the BOINC development and testing community. Thanks to you, we were able to make significant scientific contributions to the protein folding problem and to protein structure prediction methods. Our first publications are just becoming available: see, eg, http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/117860966/ABSTRACT A book on distributed computing will also appear in 2008, with a chapter describing Proteins@Home: Distributed & Grid Computing -- Science Made Transparent for Everyone. Principles, Applications and Supporting Communities, Tektum Publishers, Berlin. In the last few months, thanks to the Proteins@Home results, we have considerably improved our prediction method and are beginning to apply it to specific protein families such as the Src homology domains and so-called WW domains. This will help us identify new members of these families and understand the function of newly- discovered genes. More information is in the attached report. With our improved methodology in place, we are ready for a new computation phase. We hope that you will participate in this new phase.
Please Take a look.
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