Which DC Project is for you?

[Bollocks]

Thanks to Fodder who suggested we have a brief overview of each DC project that OCAU participates in and the pros and cons of each. Shortly this thread will be filled with information regarding each project so that you can choose which one suits you.

REMEMBER: Make sure you have permission to use PC's!

Quote by Agg.
It's easy to get caught up in the competitive spirit of distributed computing, but you MUST remember to get permission from the owners of PC's before loading your favourite client on them. This is especially true of people in corporate or educational environments where there are a lot of PC's that seem to be "sitting around" a lot of the time - these can be very tempting. Make sure you explain to the manager or owner what the aims of the project are, the effects it'll have on the PC and the network - you don't want to find yourself slapped with a bill for months of historical network usage or even worse .

Original thread

REMEMBER: Make sure you have permission to use PC's!

[Bollocks]

Folding@Home is run by the Pande Group out of the Stanford University with its main aim to understand how proteins fold or misfold so that they may understand folding related diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer's, Mad Cow disease, Parkinson's and Huntington's disease. Check out this page for a brief overview of what Folding@Home is trying to achieve.

OCAU's folding page is here http://www.overclockers.com.au/folding/ with guides and news about folding.

The Folding client is best run with a continous internet access but having said that you can run up to 8 clients simultaneously to prolong the folding session and delay the need to connect to the internet.

Folding@Home processes various proteins or Work Units that vary in size and the amount of time taken to complete them. Varying in time from 4hrs to 24hrs on a fast computer to several days on a slow computer. All work must be returned by the deadline time to be of use. There is no caching of work units with FAH a completed WU must be returned and a new one downloaded

A typical WU will consume about 300 to 400k of bandwidth for a combined down/upload for the Tinker proteins.

When comparing which is the best processor to run Folding@Home on AMD processors have the leading edge over Intel processors. But a new method of processing the proteins has been released and will become mainstream soon, this process (Gromacs) will greatly improve the performance of the Intels.

Current the FAH client will run on the Windows, MAC
OS X and Linux platforms and comes in a Graphical or Console (text only) version.

The client only uses spare or idle CPU cycles and doesnt interfere with the normal use of your computer.

For more information visit http://www.overclockers.com.au/folding/

The Ultimate Folding@Home Guide


Folding FAQ worth a look, it may just help you out.

Folding Client Setup Guide: by Ellroy80

[Bald Devil]

SETI stands for the Search or Extra Terrestrial Intelligence and is just that, scanning space for the possible signs of little green men. This is done by running a small free program that analyses packets of information from the Arecibo Radio Telescope, which is scanning space for artificial radio signals.

The SETI project is run by the Berkeley University.

The SETI @ Home website is here.

Seti runs on an application called BOINC, which stands for Berkeley Open infrastructure for Network Computing. BOINC is a free, open source application that can be used for many other distributed projects apart from SETI as well.

You can get the BOINC application to crunch SETI Packets here! for use on Windows, MAC, Linux and many other platforms in both a Graphical version and a Command Line based version.

Compared to the classic versions of SETI, BOINC takes care of alot more things. Separate applications for caching and hiding the seti client are no longer needed. BOINC's features include packet caching, hiding in the system tray or running as a service as well as some statistics. BOINC also has an option for you to be able to remote control headless nodes on your network from a GUI based installation (perfect for processor farms).

The URL for SETI is "http://setiathome.berkeley.edu" and this URL needs to be entered into BOINC to attach to the SETI project when you first start.

BOINC also has the ability to set preferences such as how much CPU time to use, work during certain hours and how many days worth of packets should be cached. All of these settings are set on your account at the SETI web site and any changes to these settings are pushed down to the clients when they next connect to the server.

Packet sizes don't vary much from the classic SETI work unit size of ~350K and uploaded packets vary depending on the amount of information sent back, but the average size is usually around 500 bytes.

OCAU had quite a strong SETI community with a SETI Competition Sticky in the Distributed Computing forum. This Thread was used for just about anything to do with SETI including challenging each other to race to a milestone, news, to talk about SETI problems and even for group statistics. However since the introduction of BOINC and the end of seti Classic, conversations on the thread have become fewerand fewer and this thread has now been closed. There is a new thread for discussion and help with seti here at Seti@Home HELP and Challenges!, feel free to drop in and leave a message.

OCAU's SETI Ladder is here! - And more detailed statistics can be found here!

The SETI client only uses spare or idle CPU cycles as well and it doesnt interfere with the normal use of your computer. A good idea is to also run a second BOINC project at the same time, as this means that if one project goes down you will still be doing work.

Crunch SETI with us to help find ET!!

EDIT: Changed to reflect move to BOINC

[res0r9lm]

I have been running CommunityTSC for a little over a month. It uses the same client as D2OL and the objective is to find a drug canidate to cure "Tuberous Sclerosis Complex" which is a genetic disorder that causes tumors in the organs of children, including the brain, kidneys, heart, eyes, lungs and other organs.

http://www.childhooddiseases.org/index.html

[mickwish]

Find-a-Drug

Find-a-Drug is run on a not for profit basis by Treweren Consultants, the company who developed the THINK software for virtual screening. The science for this project was directed by Keith Davies who is an honorary research fellow at the University of Oxford and is the founder of Treweren Consultants and Director of Find-a-Drug. The Find-a-Drug cancer project is a reflection on Keith Davies personal motivations and interest in continuing the work begun with United Devices (See Moose's post above) developing therapies for cancer which affects one in four individuals. The latest version of THINK is approximately 40 times faster than version 1.03 used on the United Devices platform. In addition, Find-a-Drug uses geographically dispersed servers which provides superior redundancy and avoids contention downloading jobs and uploading results. Find-a-Drug aims to run a series of projects in parallel addressing a number of diseases which have a major impact on health. You can elect to opt in and out of projects which is a nice option. at any time using the Find-a-Drug control panel.

The Find-a-Drug THINK client is a great DC client, with low system specs required, and runs very nicely in on a network with a client/server setup. It doesn’t have the millions of members or nice pretty graphics of UD, but continues the original work of the University of Oxford research team. It's only a very small DC project yet, but will grow as more find out about it, IMO. They have a great support forum which is very helpful, and the project developers are very responsive to suggestions fo changes!

Overclockers Australia now has it's own team in Find-a-Drug (thanks RustyGT!), and the team number is 2052 (you neter that into the control panel during setup). You can view the team stats page here. So how about crunching for a cure at Find-a-Drug for OCAU now!!!

Cheers
Mick

PS Thanks to RustyGT for the heads up on this thread!

edit: added info about OCAU team.

[idosillythings]

This FAQ and other Muon Information can be found at http://home.iprimus.com.au/theace1/MuonMain.html

The official webpage for the project is www.stephenbrooks.org

Muon FAQ:

What is a Muon?

A muon is a fundamental particle, produced in weak radioactive decays of pions; symbol u; mass 106 MeV; charge -1; spin 1/2. It behaves like a heavy electron, but decays to an electron and neutrinos. It was discovered in 1937 by Carl Anderson in cosmic ray experiments.

What does the Project hope to Achieve?

The experiment is called the Neutrino Factory, scheduled for construction some time around 2015. Its primary aim is to fire beams of neutrinos (fundamental particles) through the Earth's interior to detector stations on different continents. They're doing this to measure whether they change type en route (there are 3 types of neutrino) and data from this in turn will allow them to determine the neutrino's mass (and whether it even has mass).

The reason they want to do this is that the neutrino is just about the most common particle in the universe (billions pass through your body every second) and if it has mass, this could cause the universe to eventually recollapse on itself. Knowing the mass will also allow scientists to make better models of how the universe began.

Actually the machine that's being built (costing at least $1.9bn) has several scientific aims. The neutrinos are used for fundamental physics experiments, but the proton beam that is produced at the start (this hits the target rod at the beginning of the simulation you download) is also going to be used in experiments for neutralising radioactive waste by transmuting the radioactive elements into stable ones.

What is the Reason for my Input?

You are simulating the part of the process where the protons hit a target rod and cause pions to be emitted, which decay into muons, which then proceed to a storage ring and decay into electrons and neutrinos. This is a fairly critical part of the apparatus, which catches the pions and confines some of them into a beam while they decay into muons. The efficiency of this dictates that of the entire machine. If the R&D says it isn't efficient enough it may not get funded to be built, but users of this program have already doubled the estimated efficiency, so it probably will.

How do I get Started?

To get started simply follow the guide in the Installation section of my website. For more information on the project and current developments head over to www.stephenbrooks.org

How long do the work units take to process?

The time taken to process work units varies with the amount of particles and the parcentage of particles transferred. The larger the percentage transferred the more time the work units will take. Like most distributed computing projects Athlon XP processors are faster than the Pentium 4s. It will work fine on any system though due to the no time limit factor.

Are there any downloads or time limits for the work units?

No, there is no download of work units or time limit. The client produces its own work units using the results.dat file. By using the Best 250 file better results can be obtained.

How do I send my results?

If the computer is connected to the internet permenately then use the auto sen feature.
If the computer is on a limited internet basis then use the manual send feature when online.
If the computer has no internet access copy the results.txt file to a computer with interent access and send it using the manual send feature. (Warning do not overwrite the other results.txt file!)

How is work unit's score calculated?

Here is the how the score is allocated for each work unit:
score = No of particles if less than 1% transfer
score = No of particles * 5 * floor(transfer %) if more than 1%

floor(x) = x rounded down to next integer

Are there any Teams in this Project?

Yes there are many teams in this project. I am currently in the Overclockers Australia team. To join a team simply put their tag before your name and and you will be added to the team. For example to join the Overclockers Australia team put '[OCAU]' before your name.

How often are the stats updated?

The stats are updated approximately every 2 hours.


*This FAQ was compiled using information from www.stephenbrooks.org, Webster Encyclopedia, and the Overclockers Australia Forums.

[dexter_dsg]

Do you want to find the biggest prime number ever known?
Do you want to take a slice of the prize money to find it?

Take the challange

PM me for the details...

[Kalgregor]

"Climate change, and our response to it, are issues of global importance, affecting food production, water resources, ecosystems, energy demand, insurance costs and much else. There is a broad scientific consensus that the Earth is likely to warm over the coming century, but estimates of how much vary hugely. By taking part in the climateprediction.net experiment you can help to improve scientific forecasts of 21st century climate."

The aim of climateprediction.net is to investigate the approximations that have to be made in state-of-the-art climate models. Currently the project is in the 'Experiment 1' stage, which is a sensitivity analysis of the parameters used in the climate change model. There are hundreds of parameters in the model (as in all climate models). Parameters which are poorly constrained by observations are perturbed to examine the uncertainty in the model's response.

Experiment 2 will be a simulation from 1950-2000 with historical climate forcings (such as solar variability, greenhouse gases, etc), followed by Experiment 3, where a simulation of 2000-2050 with a suite of possible future forcings. Runs which are reasonably consistent with observations will be used as the basis for the 2000-2050 forecast.

The model takes a while to run, so you wont need to access the internet a lot, although stats will be reported to the server every 4 hours if you stay online. CPU is the most important component and the project only uses about 50Mb of RAM. You must have around 600Mb of free space for it to work with, but the download is about 7.5Mb. There is no linux support just yet, but it is planned.

If you've got some spare computing power and want to know what the climate will be like in the future, if the earths gonna heat up (especially important for us overclockers without airconditioning in our homes), or if you are interested in atmospheric science or applied mathematics, or you just want to help team Overclockers Australia fight its way up the rankings then feel free to join us. More details about the experiment and the download can be found at http://www.climateprediction.net

To join the Overclockers Australia team, just visit your user profile page, then Add/Edit/Join Group, then we're last in the K-O section and all you have to do is click join and you're in.

[Bollocks]

Predictor@Home

A new BOINC project has been started called Predictor@Home, and it is similar to other Folding projects around. It is part of the Scripps Research Institute.

Since it's BOINC, you can run different projects at the same time, and allocate specific amounts of resources to each.

Head over to Predictor@Home for more information.
I love the Website, Information is easily accessible. Forums need some more work though.

It uses 50MB of RAM, and finishes a WU in 6H on my 1GHz Transmeta Laptop
Current stable BOINC version: 3.07.

Thread is here

[Bollocks]

What is Rosetta@Home? I here you say.

Well "Rosetta@Home is a scientific research project that uses internet-connected computers to predict and design protein structures, and protein-protein and protein-ligand interactions. Our goal is to develop methods that accurately predict and design protein structures and complexes, an endeavor that may ultimately help researchers develop cures for human diseases (See the Human Proteome Folding Project, a collaborative effort to apply our software on the human genome). Our project relies on individuals, like you, who donate time on their computers to collectively provide the computing power necessary to further develop, test, and improve our methods." Rosetta@Home Main Site

As a project it is very similar to Predictor@Home, I spose just another group trying to do it. JDSL Have set up an OCAU team to join and everyone is welcome to help out, R@H is a fairly new project so i don't think it'd be that hard to start climbing the ranks. As with predictor@home (which is our best ranking BONIC project mind you) We would love some help on this project.

Stats can be found here with BOINC Stats, can't wait to see you on the team listing.

-Lucus

Thread is here

[Rocoll]

Why QMC@HOME?

Why does it matter?

The ability to accurately predict molecular structure and reactivity is of importance to the whole of chemistry and life sciences. Quantum Chemistry is a vital field of theoretical research into these phenomena. A very promising new Quantum Chemistry method is Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC). Our project Quantum Monte Carlo At Home (QMC@HOME) is dedicated to the further development of QMC for general use in Quantum Chemistry, to predict the structure and reactivity of molecules important to chemistry and life sciences.

What is Quantum Theory?

Quantum Theory was developed in the first half of the 20th century by Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Born, Heißenberg, Pauli, Dirac and others. It replaced newtonian mechanics and classical electromagnetism, as it can explain observations at atomic and subatomic levels which cannot be explained by these classical theories.

What is Quantum Chemistry?

Based on the theoretical fundament of Quantum Theory Quantum Chemistry tries to give predictions on all what is important to Chemistry. Quantum Theory equations are intractable for most of the systems of concern to chemistry, therefore smart approximations have to be made. Even with these approximations quantum chemical calculations need a lot of computing power. The only Quantum Chemistry method which is suitable for massively parallel calculations is Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC), but up to now, little is known about the performance of QMC for real life problems. Within our project we want to test and further develop the opportunities of QMC for quantum chemical calculations.

Quanten Monte Carlo (QMC) is a great opportunity for Quantum Chemistry. But QMC needs extensive testing and further development. To raise the needed computing power we decided to use the BOINC Public Resource Computing Middleware to set up our Quanten Monte Carlo At Home (QMC@HOME) project. With the help of volunteers all over the world we want to raise the computing power that is needed to test and further develop QMC for general use in Quantum Chemistry.


Go to QMC@HOME at
http://qah.uni-muenster.de/index.php

Join the OCAU team at
http://qah.uni-muenster.de/team_display.php?teamid=276

We're team #42 heading to #1 with your help

Go on - just do it

[7nothing]

http://www.distributed.net/rc5/

Or as I like to call it, "dnetc for winter" - the main advantage in my opinion is the fact that given enough PC's it will raise room temperatures to a more comfortable level. The mathematically insignificant chance of winning $1000 US before you die by running RC-72 is an added bonus.

Why Dnetc?

To do something with all this computing power
After finishing the RC5-56 and RC5-64 contests, it was a natural next step because the existing client code base could be very easily converted to run RC5-72. Instead of making a mad rush to push the next generation, general purpose clients out the door, we decided to make the small alterations necessary to allow the existing clients to participate in the 72-bit contest as soon as possible. Providing new client software quickly helped maintain the interest of our large number of volunteers by providing a task we could continue to work on as a group.

To prove that small-bitsize encryption is insufficient
A loosely organized group of people on the internet (us!) deciphered an encrypted message in their spare time. That might be sufficient reason for the governments, security firms, and others to rethink their current beliefs of what "safe" encryption bitsizes are. Decrypting progressively larger bitsizes can only strengthen that argument by pushing the boundaries of what key lengths are considered feasible.

To explore the feasibility of cooperative networked multiprocessing
It's fascinating to see how easy (and difficult) it has been to band together this many computers, with this many operating systems, in so many time zones and put them all to work on a common computing task.

Because it's fun
Perhaps in the same way that writing a tic-tac-toe program in sendmail.cf is fun to some people, it's been a rewarding diversion for everyone involved.

Because you can win money!
There is a 10,000 dollar (U.S.) prize for the winner of this contest. After winning the RC5-56 contest we gave $1,000 to the owner of the computer that actually found the winning key, we kept $1,000 for ourselves and we donated the remaining $8,000 to Project Gutenberg. The prize distribution for this contest will be similar, and everyone participating has a chance to vote on which nonprofit should receive the majority of the funds. You can read more about the prize money distribution on the stats site. Other monetary prizes were similarly awarded for the completion of RC5-64, CSC, DES-II-1, DES-II-2, and DES-III

To get to know more people
You'd be amazed at the number of people you can meet by participating in this project, especially if you hang out in the #distributed channel on IRC, or subscribe to the mailing lists.

To attract the opposite sex
Well, maybe it has, maybe it hasn't. You never know .

[Rocoll]

Have another look at uFluids
A new science app, version 4.10, has been released.
They have solved the issues that pissed people off.

Join the OCAU team at
http://www.ufluids.net/team_display.php?teamid=406

[AfterBurner1]

Enigma@Home

Enigma@Home is a wrapper between BOINC and Stefan Krah's M4 Project. 'The M4 Project is an effort to break 3 original Enigma messages with the help of distributed computing. The signals were intercepted in the North Atlantic in 1942 and are believed to be unbroken.' the M4 Project also takes this further because at the same time your computer is helping to break the 2.5 Million different Cipher codes that have baffled intelligence analysts al over the world for decades.

the Enigma Machine was in use by Industry, Government and the corporate World all those years ago. Now of course everything is digitized. Let's decode the last few unbroken messages of the Wehrmacht Enigma machine. I might also point out that the cracking of the cipher used on the Wehrmacht Enigma's also applies to regular Enigma machines.

the Project is also sending out work units that are purely for breaking the possible cipher combos of the Enigma machine to help historians and researchers alike to decipher and comprehend a small part of what happened in the past with particular reference to WWII.

I might also add that this is by far the most stable running project I've ever had the pleasure of running.

[AfterBurner1]

GPUGRID.net is a distributed computing infrastructure devoted to biomedical research. Thanks to the contribution of volunteers, GPUGRID scientists can perform molecular simulations to understand the function of proteins in health and disease.

of Recent GPUGRID has been putting out far more diverse ranges of simulations and everyone with a CUDA capable Nvidia GPU should be able to run it easlily.


Overclockers Australia Team