Distributed Computing « Michael Graham Richard

Distributed Computing

I’m a big fan of distributed computing. I think it’s a very elegant way to give scientists access to large quantities of computing power that would otherwise be wasted.

A good primer on the subject can be found here: How-To: Join Distributed Computing projects that benefit humanity

What if some of the world’s estimated 650 million PCs (and 250 million households with broadband Internet) could be linked to assist scientists in solving critical real world problems? This is exactly what humanitarian grid computing is about!

Donate your computer’s idle CPU time to humanitarian non-profit scientific research projects. Help find cures for diseases like cancer, AIDS, diabetes, MS, Alzheimer, or help predict the earth’s climate change, or advance science e.g. search for gravitational waves, help CERN build its latest particle accelerator or Berkeley search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Project I currently support

Rosetta@Home (protein/RNA/enzyme design - join my team here)

Other projects that I like

Folding@Home (understanding protein folding and misfolding — I like it, but it is so popular that your CPU cycles probably make a bigger marginal difference elsewhere, like Rosetta@Home. If you have a PS3 you should definitely contribute, though. Here’s a very interesting podcast interview with Dr. Vijay S. Pande, Director of Folding@Home.)
Orbit@Home (I can’t crunch data because it’s still in development — see this post for more info about Asteroids and Near Earth Objects)
ClimatePrediction.net (climate modeling)
BOINC Simap (public database of pre-calculated protein similarities.)
Einstein@Home (search for gravity waves from spinning neutron stars)

You can see my BOINC stats here.

How to help

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, better known as BOINC, is the platform used by most projects (including all of those I listed above).

To get started there are three steps: