Real Science !
A new class of science projects make use of the power of millions of computers connected through the Internet to perform calculations beyond the realm of possibility for even the largest supercomputers. The projects operate by distributing chunks of the calculations to personal computers which then get processed during otherwise idle time which then send the result back to the servers and download another chunk to work on. If your computer is turned on, it might as well be doing something useful!
Is there life out there? This
is your chance to help find out. By downloading and running this
screensaver program on your Internet-connected computer you can
contribute valuable computer cycles to process the mountains of
data being downloaded at the radio telescope at Aricebo to
locate possible extraterrestrial radio signals.
If your interests are
closer to home. Like finding cures for diseases and otherwise
finding out how life works, this one might be right up your
alley. This project is working to determine precisely how
proteins, the basis for all life, self-assemble themselves.
Knowledge gained here will allow for more effective medicines
and treatments so you might say "your life depends on
it".
After working on Folding I
changed over to Genome. My collection of antiquated computers
proved insufficient to maintain any sort of progress in the
demanding world of protein folding so I gave them a break and
set them to working on genomics. This project is run by Stanford
too but makes fewer hardware demands so even my old 1997 vintage
laptop could make a contribution -- at least up until it died
totally.
I
haven't personally tried any of the projects run by this
group but they have a rather large worldwide following and have
done some interesting things like cracking encryption methods
that were seen as effectively unbreakable. They are also working
on some oddish mathematical projects (Optimal Golomb Rulers
certainly seem odd to me) if your tastes lean that way.
Another
project I haven't tried yet is called GIMPS (Great Internet
Mersenne Prime Search). If you know mathematics then you already
know what this means but if you want an explanation you should
try their site rather than struggling with any clumsy words I
might offer. This project has already made mathematical history
by discovering the 39th Mersenne prime in 2001 and the 40th in
November of 2003. They have definitely made their mark.
This
project is a big one. No way around it, trying to do large scale
climate modeling on personal computers is totally new and
unprecedented. Formerly a task which could only be handled by
the largest supercomputers it is now a project of (mostly)
Oxford and Open University in the UK. On September 12th, 2003,
the first day it went "live", I switched over to this
project on a trial basis, just to get a feel for it.
Woohoo! After running the CPDN project software pretty much
24X7 on all my networked computers since its official starting
date of 2003-9-12 I broke into the vaunted "top 200"
category on 2004-5-10. Rather amazing considering the motley
collection of computers I've got.
And Woohoo again! I reached the even more vaunted "top
100" on 2005-1-8 still running the same motley collection
of computers. I guess this goes to show being stubborn and
persistent will sometimes bring success despite the odds.
Well, it had to happen eventually. Around the beginning of 2007
I had a falling out with this group over how they were handling
some of their original participants during a transition. This
really shouldn't affect anyone starting afresh so don't
let my final bad experience influence you. The work they are
doing is still worthwhile.
This is another huge project. In fact it
is several huge projects rolled into one. Mostly health and
biological research, it aims to do no less than to find cures
for serious diseases. Users are given a choice of which projects
their computers should support and the system distributes work
accordingly. And, surprisingly, their project requires almost no
interaction and burdens computers relatively lightly.
I've switched my main computers over to this project. This
time around I was clever enough not to start my laptop running
any long-term calculations since its health seems a bit shaky at
the moment. Perhaps someone should start a research project to
determine why I have such bad luck with my laptops.
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