BOINC

Post Reply New Topic

I've got a wee bit of a confession here... One of my obsessions is donating what ever CPU power I'm not using to scientific research. There are several projects that I'm a participant in, but there are only a select few that I'm proud of participating in: Rosetta@home and RALPH@home.

Perhaps a little bit of detail is in order. Both of these projects involve protein strains. Basically, what these projects are doing is to take each protein strain, and figure out what the lowest energy structure of that protein strain is. It does this by folding the protein strain and seeing if it follows the required parameters.

These projects are basically the same, but there are subtle differences in them. Basically, Rosetta@home is where the bulk of the work is performed. If there is work to be done, this is the project that will have it. RALPH@home is where it tests the beta version of Rosetta@home to see if the current version has any potential errors.

What the goal is in these projects is to find cures for diseases. Basically. For example, Alzheimers and Parkensins disease's are protein-based diseases. Basically, the projects involved will take the proteins involved in these diseases and, if possible, try and find a cure for them. If a cure is not possible, then alot can be learned about these diseases.

If you want, you can participate in a team. I'm a team leader myself of both of these projects. My team is "Aftermathonian Productions".

The websites to check out are the following:

http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/
http://ralph.bakerlab.org/

If it helps at all, they have a message board for social interactions.

If there is ANYTHING that our Aspie ways can benefit humanity, it'd be this... At least in my oppinion, anyways...

Not currently, but I used to be involved with the SETI project with BOINC to help calculate inhabitable/uninhabitable systems or something like that.

I run climateprediction. Considering the small difference in power consumption between loaded/unloaded it's worth it spending a few more watts to have the computer do something useful while I tend not to.

I voted yes, but actually haven't done anything for a long while. I did SETI (The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) from before BOINC existed. I hit 500 workunits in October 2003 and then 1,000 workunits, also in October, 2004. I'm not sure when I stopped running it. I suppose I should resuscitate that account.

Seti@home - Team Arthur C Clarke Fans

I was on seti@home for years, but I stopped using it I lost all my hours of computing time, wasn't to happy about that, I had over 10,000 hours between 3 computers

I just reinstalled boinc, seti@home, does it ever run fast now, Had only 500mhz proc on my old computers

I'm gunna be in a similar boat myself as my "older" computer blew up. Getting a Quad-core.

I used to be a participant of SETI@home. It's a good project. Not my favourite, of course, but if there's intelligent life out there, then maybe they'll "beam me up" or something.

This old thread deserves to be revived. I currently run three BOINC projects: SETI@Home, Einstein@Home, and MilkyWay@Home. Any new folks running any of these projects?

If you don't know what this is about: the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing is a small application you download and run in the background on your computer. It analyzes all kinds of scientific data while your computer is idle — radio telescope data, astronomical images, faint signals from pulsars, and more. Your computer can make a genuine contribution to these research projects, and all you have to do is let the little application run in the background.

Download it and try it here: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/

They also have a new thing called Science United that is supposed to be a simpler version for less computer savvy people. I tried it and couldn't get it to work at all, so I'm either too unsavvy, or too savvy for my own good (since I run BOINC just fine).

This is the screensaver you can use with the SETI@Home project:



And this is the one for Einstein@Home:

At the moment, my laptop is analyzing gamma-ray data coming from somewhere in the constellation Perseus.

https://einsteinathome.org/