Do you, or would you dis-comp ?

Anti

What i want to find out is, are you already using a dis-comp client, or would you consider running one.

If so do you do this for the geniune advancement of medical research? Or do you treat it as a game, ie. the more work units/points = higher ranking, therefore bragging rights over other people taking part......

Personally I do it for the medical advancement. My sister, who i was very close to passed away christmas 2005. Yeah i was folding before she left, but afterwards i realised just how much help cancer research needed, Yeah im just one person....But every little helps!

Distributing computing does't just deal with medical research, it also helps in the the Search for Extraterrestial Intelligence or SETI. This is a programme run in conjunction with NASA and helps to analyze radio telescope data recieved from space. There is also grid.org, this deals with research into Anthrax, Smallpox, Cancer and the new Human Proteome Folding Project.

If you need futher information on any of the different projects look up the following:

grid.org, folding.standford.edu or setiathome.berkeley.edu


So basically if you fold or if you don't which one would you chose?

Jules

I do the folding at home, not anything to do you points or ranking, for me it more to do with the medical research. My Nanny passed away over 13 years ago for Cancer, and it effected me and my whole family. My sister also does a lot of work with Barretstown Gang Camp in Kildare. A lot of kids with terminally illness including all types of Cancer. So im trying to do my little bit to help. Another reason i do it is because someone who is extremelly important to me asked if i would help!

Anti

Thats really nice of you jules, I'm glad your doing somthing to help. Every little bit helps dosen't it

Keep up the good work..

neGev

Folding@Home, because I get that warm fuzzy feeling

BabyEater

I do the folding at home for a while now. Used to do Seti but feel the folding is more worthwhile.

Fogmatic

I tried the cancer research one once - the one that tries molecules together for fit. It was to support the research, but unfortunately some software conflict always caused my computer to crash. Going into sleep mode in itself might have been the problem, so I don't any more (I mean, my computer doesn't!). And I shut it down when not actively using it anyway (a continuous noise can be annoying in our open-plan home, which also attracts lightning so I unplug the whole lot including modem, when not in use).

But it did feel like a brilliant idea. I wonder if anyone's looked into bundling the program(s) with every new computer? Users could disable/uninstall it if there's some reason not to run it, and it might bring in some people who don't download the software because of inertia.

watty

There's more to distributed computing than public Internet projects of unknown virtue (to average person).

Jules

relavent to boards.ie?

Karoma

jules80 wrote:

relavent to boards.ie?

What's relavent?

The question posed was (Loosely) "Do you dis-comp?". Watty's answer is valid and highlighted a rather limited poll answer selection.
I do, but not such public projects that are obviously fuelling super-secret-alien-cover-ups, world domination, and the advancement of chemical and/or biological warfare.

Boston

jules80 wrote:

relavent to boards.ie?

Boards runs on a distributed (those small) system.

Jules

Karoma wrote:

What's relavent?

The question posed was (Loosely) "Do you dis-comp?". Watty's answer is valid and highlighted a rather limited poll answer selection.
I do, but not such public projects that are obviously fuelling super-secret-alien-cover-ups, world domination, and the advancement of chemical and/or biological warfare.

it was a simple question. Im new to distributed computing and only know of the ones set out above, if ya want to enlighten us then start another thread sure mob would be happy with any information that would help! i know i would...

little knowledge can only get you so far!

SouperComputer

I came across this board today and I was thinking it would be more to do with projects such as plan9 or video processing rather than seti, folding@home etc etc.

I did fold once upon a time, but it made my room extremely warm! Im building a new setup (1x conroe, 1x Dual Core P4, 1x Prescott, 1x Northwood, 1 iBook and 1xPowerbook) from scratch and may resconsider my folding habits.

/edit just reinstalled folding on the prescott, should save my Gas bill

Anti

IT will be about plan9 and other multi processing forms, But just give me time

Dont forget those dual core cpus you have can run two instances of most of the aforementioned software, Just by installing it to a different location And setting the correct affinity.

verbatim

Its good to see people are donating their clock cycles to webcomputing projects. Distributed computing goes beyond these projects and there is a lot of research being done in Ireland on the area. Here in Maynooth we have developed a Java Distributed System which allows people to setup their own distributed system very quickly. At the moment we run problems from the areas of Bioinfomatics, Biomedical engineering, and Cryptography, like analysing DNA from the HIV virus, simulating new medical imaging techniques, etc.... using the spare clock cycles of upto 300 PCs around the university.

So if your interested in setting up your own distributed system, check out our webpage http://www.cs.nuim.ie/distributed

riptide

Anti just directed me here. I think DC (as i call it) is a great passtime/hobby. I run/ran several clients of various forms. Rosetta (I'm on the worlds No.1 team) was one I first started out with. Was one of thee best Health apps out there. But the project forums there got very bitter and a we were all called cheats cos we used an optimized vaersion of bionc files that helped the benchmark. Also most of the team are total overclockers and our scores were well above everyone elses and that lead to jealoousy and friction. Needless to say Dr. David Baker refused to act like a man and most of the team quit. Either way we out produced every other team out there in pure work alone. They changed the scoring system and a lot of politics went on. There are many active SETI memeber on forums who go around trying to push upon other a cross BIONC scoring system.

Personally I think SETI is a great waste of resources. Although I can admit that SETI paved the way for how DC is done nowadays.

I ran Rosetta because it wone CASP6 and CASP7 (protein prediction competition) and seemed like the best app out there and I also witnessed the demise and passing of my grandfather and gaurdian to cancer.

Other apps I run/ran are Dimes, Majestic12. These are what one would call 'internet apps'. they don't have the moral high ground of a medical app but they are fun from a stats point of view and are challenging from a tweaking and technical point of view to get the last drop out of your connection and harware, and your personal skillz.

WCG, or World Community Grid most of my team now run. A very well run concern by all accounts that was originally setup by IBM. Although the scoring is by a quoram of 3 (ie. same WU run by 3 diff machine and the average score goes to all 3) people with high end machines still come out with good results.

The project which seems to have most of my time and effort now is SeventeenorBust. This is the goal of proving the Sierpinski number theory. And it involves finding 17 prime numbers. 9 are already found and 8 are left. This app is particularly suited to intel gear, both P4/Netburst and Core .

Anyways enough for this post. Any questions about any DC apps PM or better still write here or a new thread for all to see and learn.

For all your stats go to http://stats.free-dc.org