Boinc

[laconicstudent]

BOINC stands for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing.

There are literally dozens of projects, from searching for extraterrestrial life, protein folding, ligand docking, modeling the spread and eradication of malaria, cancer research, modeling fluid mechanics in differing gravities, crunching data from the Large Hadron Collider, doing cryptological analysis, helping mathematicians prove and disprove their theorems, making long-term climate predictions, creating a detailed model of the Milky Way galaxy, doing genetic linkage analysis to determine precisely which genes cause certain genetic disorders.


Basically, a lot of research generates a huge quantity of raw data. Since supercomputers are a little expensive and hard to requisition, Berkeley created BOINC. The research teams will upload packets of raw data onto the server, and they will be downloaded onto idling computers running BOINC. When you aren't using your computer, your computer will start crunching numbers for that project, and upload the results when finished, then download a new work unit.

Science loves you. You get to feel good about helping researchers analyze their latest tapes from the Arecibo Observatory for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, help create a model of the Milky Way, or model how proteins fold!

This stuff is good. Instead of donating your money to charity, you can donate the power of your CPU.

BOINC

 

[Chesterton]

Science loves you.

Prove it. Tell Science to write a love poem to me (without using the word "useful").

 

[laconicstudent]

Prove it. Tell Science to write a love poem to me (without using the word "useful").

I found a sort of a love poem to science from Orpheus.... does that count?

TO MERCURY

The Fumigation from Frankincense.

Hermes, draw near, and to my pray'r incline, angel of Jove, and Maia's son divine;
Studious of contests, ruler of mankind, with heart almighty, and a prudent mind.
Celestial messenger, of various skill, whose pow'rful arts could watchful Argus kill:
With winged feet, 'tis thine thro' air to course, O friend of man, and prophet of discourse:
Great life-supporter, to rejoice is thine, in arts gymnastic, and in fraud divine:
With pow'r endu'd all language to explain, of care the loos'ner, and the source of gain.
Whose hand contains of blameless peace the rod, Corucian, blessed, profitable God;
Of various speech, whose aid in works we find, and in necessities to mortals kind:
Dire weapon of the tongue, which men revere, be present, Hermes, and thy suppliant hear;
Assist my works, conclude my life with peace, give graceful speech, and me memory's increase.

I'm not really sure science loves us, I was being somewhat fictitious. But we love science. Or at least, some of us do.

 

[bigbadwilf]

It's not an entirely new concept, I think it was SETI who first used it.

My one issue with it is what was in the small print of one of the early ones that I looked at (I think it was a smallpox vaccine) where the USDOD reserved the right not to release the resultant product (if any) on the grounds of national security and/or commercial confidentiality.
I think that particular smallprint died a death when it was found out. I, like I'm sure many other people, don't have a problem with donating our idle computer time to something that is going to be used altruistically, but less so if someone is going to be potentially making a fortune out of it.

 

[pgp_protector]

 

[laconicstudent]

It's not an entirely new concept, I think it was SETI who first used it.

My one issue with it is what was in the small print of one of the early ones that I looked at (I think it was a smallpox vaccine) where the USDOD reserved the right not to release the resultant product (if any) on the grounds of national security and/or commercial confidentiality.
I think that particular smallprint died a death when it was found out. I, like I'm sure many other people, don't have a problem with donating our idle computer time to something that is going to be used altruistically, but less so if someone is going to be potentially making a fortune out of it.

Yeah, I think there's a few projects that are specifically set up and run with some private rights, I know there's at least one university in Spain that runs a distributed computing project for its various research programs, and I think they reserve the rights to their results....

But most distributed computing projects are also funded by government grants, which mean they CAN'T hold back their results.

I would imagine that the smallpox research fine-print may have been honestly motivated by security concerns. Smallpox kind of freaks people out.

Boinc is a truly wonderful things. Right now, my computer is running Seti@Home Beta, which is really AstroPulse. I'm aiding in the search for primordial black holes, pulsars along with Extraterrestrial intelligence by searching the work unit for regularly repeating pulses.

 

[Gracchus]

I have been running BOINC for a few years now. At first I was running only setiathome. It does add an annoying couple of minutes to Windows' restart.

 

[juvenissun]

BOINC stands for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing.

There are literally dozens of projects, from searching for extraterrestrial life, protein folding, ligand docking, modeling the spread and eradication of malaria, cancer research, modeling fluid mechanics in differing gravities, crunching data from the Large Hadron Collider, doing cryptological analysis, helping mathematicians prove and disprove their theorems, making long-term climate predictions, creating a detailed model of the Milky Way galaxy, doing genetic linkage analysis to determine precisely which genes cause certain genetic disorders.


Basically, a lot of research generates a huge quantity of raw data. Since supercomputers are a little expensive and hard to requisition, Berkeley created BOINC. The research teams will upload packets of raw data onto the server, and they will be downloaded onto idling computers running BOINC. When you aren't using your computer, your computer will start crunching numbers for that project, and upload the results when finished, then download a new work unit.

Science loves you. You get to feel good about helping researchers analyze their latest tapes from the Arecibo Observatory for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, help create a model of the Milky Way, or model how proteins fold!

This stuff is good. Instead of donating your money to charity, you can donate the power of your CPU.

BOINC

How do I know my data on my computer is safe?

 

[laconicstudent]

How do I know my data on my computer is safe?

Client security and sandboxing - BOINC


What possible reason would you have to suspect that this is some identity theft scam? There's no possible reason or motivation to try and steal your information through this.

 

[Belk]

BOINC stands for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing.

To bad they could not call it Berkeley Infrastructure Open for Network Inter Computing

 

[juvenissun]

Client security and sandboxing - BOINC


What possible reason would you have to suspect that this is some identity theft scam? There's no possible reason or motivation to try and steal your information through this.

But it is capable, isn't it?

 

[pgp_protector]

But it is capable, isn't it?

It's also possible your ISP is copying all your information, or Microsoft, Or Apple, or a version of Linux.

 

[laconicstudent]

It's also possible your ISP is copying all your information, or Microsoft, Or Apple, or a version of Linux.

Correct. Frankly, if your that worried, and you refuse to believe in the security measures as described in that link that specifically answered your concerns, your too paranoid to be using a computer at all, really.

BOINC would only be capable if the security measures outlined in that link were a lie, and again, what POSSIBLE MOTIVATION would a microbiologist researcher have to toss his career by doing something so pointless?

 

[Gracchus]

There is always a "good reason" not to do the right thing, the helpful thing. Christians are usually experts.

 

[laconicstudent]

There is always a "good reason" not to do the right thing, the helpful thing. Christians are usually experts.

I'm a bit flabbergasted that someone would consider BOINC a security risk. Beyond the fact that convicting the information thieves would be laughably easy, and no motivation, the existence of code specifically to prevent that in the client, it is an open source client, I believe. If someone snuck in malicious code, it'd be noticed by the first code-savvy user to look at it.