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There are lots and lots of people out there who use Linux for numerical number-crunching and scientific tasks.

I run Fedora Linux on my desktop and keep it running 24/7. One of the reasons is that I always have BOINC running in the background, doing work for The World Community Grid and Einstein@home. This way, I can be using my computer to help others even when I'm asleep, or away from home.

I also recommend humanitarian research via BOINC, specifically using the World Community Grid, which hosts an excellent selection of worthy projects. https://secure.worldcommunityg...

Good thing you're not solving real problems. What. A. Fucking. Waste.

This a thousand times over. Run this equipment with World Community Grid or Folding@Home, might lead to curing cancer or AIDS. Fuck, just donate it to some medical research effort and maybe in 20 years a cure will come out and save your ass.

Bitcoin? Megawattage flushed down the entropy hole. Wouldn't it suck for all the bitcoiners if a talented mathematician found a way to trivially circumvent the bitcoin exchange system or if someone came up with a new cryptocurrency that people just liked better (I think both are just a matter of time), leaving Bitcoiners with worthless data stored on hard drives. Maybe all that fine computing equipment won't end up in the landfill, but that's a lot of heat and fossil fuel gone for nothing.

Good thing you're not solving real problems. What. A. Fucking. Waste.

This a thousand times over. Run this equipment with World Community Grid or Folding@Home, might lead to curing cancer or AIDS. Fuck, just donate it to some medical research effort and maybe in 20 years a cure will come out and save your ass.

Bitcoin? Megawattage flushed down the entropy hole. Wouldn't it suck for all the bitcoiners if a talented mathematician found a way to trivially circumvent the bitcoin exchange system or if someone came up with a new cryptocurrency that people just liked better (I think both are just a matter of time), leaving Bitcoiners with worthless data stored on hard drives. Maybe all that fine computing equipment won't end up in the landfill, but that's a lot of heat and fossil fuel gone for nothing.

If you think good will for your company would go further than a few cryptocoins, you could do World Community Grid.

Imagen if all that computer power was put to use such as finding the cure of HIV.... We would be done by lunch time.

If anyone wants to contribute to computer research on HIV with their own systems then there is a World Community Grid project called Fight Aids At home (FAAH) that uses your computer's spare cycles to work on AIDS research, using the BOINC platform.

There are versions for Windows, Apple, Linux, and Android software.

Dude, take like 20 seconds to do some basic research on what you're talking about: https://secure.worldcommunityg... "What's the answer to the protein folding problem?" - "42, now give me my money." "Um, everyone else says it's 38, so no, I won't give you your money." When have you ever done an experiment just once? Also, with regard to hashing, I'm trying to think of another system that's hard to do and easy to verify....Oh wait, like every differential equation known to physics.

This is the main problem I have with Bitcoin. Here we have a brilliant opportunity to harness computing power to solve a socially or scientifically relevant problem, and instead we waste it on solving random meaningless math problems. In my book, an ideal cryptocurrency would use that computing power to solve a protein folding problem, or a plasma physics problem, or any other number of things. You wouldn't need an artificial upper limit like BTC has, because in generating a new block of currency, you'd actually be creating something of value to society. Riecoin approaches cryptocurrency from this point of view (albeit still with an asymptotic limit on the number of total currency units, and only applied specifically to computations of potential counterexamples to the Riemann Hypothesis), as does IBM's World Community Grid to a certain extent (albeit without the ability to easily and securely transfer the virtual cash generated), but I'd really like to see it take off.

Re: Gates Foundation and malaria.

Also worthy of note is the GO Fight Against Malaria Project at World Community Grid and the research done at Scripps in La Jolla. From the Wikipedia article,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Community_Grid#GO_Fight_Against_Malaria_Project

a relevant portion
"In the latest status report, published on November 2012 and available here, the scientists reported that several compounds had been found to inhibit the virus activity. 20 compounds were ordered, 19 actually arrived, of which 3 were not soluble. From the remaining 16, 7 inhibited Mtb InhA(Mycobacterium tuberculosis). The best hit displayed an IC50 value of approximately 40 micro-Molar. The discovery of this compound is important because of the drug resistant superbugs of Mycobacterium tuberculosis."

The "here" link is
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread_thread,34265_offset,0#401213

and current status as of 10 July 2013 at
http://gofightagainstmalaria.scripps.edu/index.php/how-we-will-discover-potential-malaria-drugs

Their data is open and available.

I read the FAQ linked from the featured article. It pauses while the phone is not plugged into a charger, and it pauses until the battery is at least 90 percent charged.

Consider that a lot of the volunteers might be installing WCG on work machines. "This job is a terrible waste of my life, but at least I can use some of my employer's money to do computations that might make solar cells better!" :D

Also consider that a significant portion of the "volunteers" are IBM employees. World Community Grid comes pre-installed on our work laptops, and over 10% of daily WCG contributions come from the IBM team: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/stat/viewStatsByTeamY.do?sort=points

Are you sure I can't change your mind? Malaria kills far more people per year than cancer, and the grid computing project has far fewer participants. It's also a technically simpler problem they're trying to tackle, meaning your compute time will have significantly higher value in the long run.

(Incoming whooshes in five, four, three...)

Malaria is perceived to be a lot less scary because it can be stop-gapped with enough mosquito nets and quinine pills.

Are you sure I can't change your mind? Malaria kills far more people per year than cancer, and the grid computing project has far fewer participants. It's also a technically simpler problem they're trying to tackle, meaning your compute time will have significantly higher value in the long run.

(Incoming whooshes in five, four, three...)

I'd recommend looking at the World Community Grid and BOINC. You can pick any number of projects to contribute resources to from solving clean water problems to finding a cure for AIDS to processing massive antennae data sets to detect asteroids that may be on a collision path with earth.

Donate some CPU cycles to the cause:

There are World Community Grid projects for Clean Sustainable Water, Energy, and fighting lots of diseases. They previously had projects looking into improving the nutritious content in rice. http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/

It's powered by BOINC. http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ which also let's you donate to so many other worthy projects. http://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php

They have a few projects targeting parasites (not this one). U might not trust that donated money actually ends up where it was intended, then donate to this. Science from universities will at least get published.

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/

No one gives a fuck about your bitcoin mining problems. You must be a special kind of retard to have problems with nvidia drivers, nothing could be simpler. Don't buy shit motherboards perhaps? I don't know....except that I do. Zero problems here, ever, going all the way back to the original TNT. The same can not be said about ATI/AMD.

I don't mine bitcoins. If I did, I certainly wouldn't use nVidia GPUs. nVidia's architecture just isn't well suited for that type of workload. I participate in GPUGRID (CUDA) and World Community Grid (CPU/OpenCL). Please consider volunteering some of your excess CPU/GPU capacity to these worthy BOINC based projects.

As far as motherboards go, I'm currently running 6...all of which have been crunching DC projects 24/7 for about the last 2 years. Doesn't that indicate my motherboards aren't shitty? Or am I still being retarded?

You want to talk about heat/power problems? Fine, explain the Thunderbird to us all.

Uh, no...no I don't want to talk about heat/power problems. But you seem to, and I'd love to read your musings on the topic. I would only read, because I would never presume to engage in a debate with someone of your intellectual capacity. In any case, thanks for taking the time to grace me with your wisdom and experience. I truly feel smarter after reading your post. You must be part of Slashdot's special retard enlightenment task force.

Folding@home

Folding@home is a subset of World Community Grid (http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/). One of my Linux boxes at home is constantly working on protein folding or AIDS or related topics.

Yeah, here's my anecdotal evidence too!

My Mac Mini G4 has been running almost non-stop since 2005 when it replaced my K6-2 - 500. The Mini remained my primary computer until I bought a 24" iMac after the spring 2009 refresh. The Mini is whisper quiet (so is the iMac) and is currently sitting in the other room churning out work units for Rosetta@home and the World Community Grid, two distributed computing projects that strive to find cures for various diseases and model different energy and water usage patters.

Sure its slow, it can only churn out a work unit every 10-12 hours or so, but considering that the Mini doesn't use much power and would otherwise sit there doing nothing I figured I might as well use it for a good purpose. What impressed me about the Mini is that outside of power failures the machine has practically never been turned off, has been run pretty much full out the whole time and yet still keeps going. Say what you will about Apple, but their build quality is excellent and they make computers that can continue to be used long after most others would be relegated to the trash bin.

Somebody upthread mentioned BOINC, which is a great idea for many parallel-oriented compute-bound problems. However, while making your project compatible with BOINC is necessary, it's usually not sufficient. The problem is marketing, to convince enough people to run your work. World Community Grid, sponsored by IBM, is free and is an excellent way to solve that problem. You can submit a proposal, and if approved you'll quickly have lots of BOINC-powered computing working on your problem.

Somebody upthread mentioned BOINC, which is a great idea for many parallel-oriented compute-bound problems. However, while making your project compatible with BOINC is necessary, it's usually not sufficient. The problem is marketing, to convince enough people to run your work. World Community Grid, sponsored by IBM, is free and is an excellent way to solve that problem. You can submit a proposal, and if approved you'll quickly have lots of BOINC-powered computing working on your problem.

Don't have to, World Community Grid has already been doing cancer cure grid computing for years.
This one is complete:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/hdc/overview.do

These two are still running:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/hcc1/overview.do

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/hfcc/overview.do

Don't have to, World Community Grid has already been doing cancer cure grid computing for years.
This one is complete:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/hdc/overview.do

These two are still running:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/hcc1/overview.do

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/hfcc/overview.do

Don't have to, World Community Grid has already been doing cancer cure grid computing for years.
This one is complete:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/hdc/overview.do

These two are still running:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/hcc1/overview.do

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/hfcc/overview.do

I wonder if these guys will succeed first...

-l

Well you could get involved with:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/
and donate some processor time to FightAIDS@Home

Just a thought.

Anyone know how this compares to the World Community Grid?

also see http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/projects_showcase/viewResearch.do/

current topics include:
Nutritious Rice for the World
Help Conquer Cancer
AfricanClimate@Home
Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together
Human Proteome Folding - Phase 2 Project
FightAIDS@Home Project

Good. Maybe soon, all the BOINC users wasting time searching for non-existent aliens will move on to something useful!

World Community Grid is a boinc project , no Seti@home no boinc, no boinc no World Community Grid.

Good. Maybe soon, all the BOINC users wasting time searching for non-existent aliens will move on to something useful!

There is always http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ Pick a project you like and crunch away...

Fantastic. Thank you!

There is always http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ Pick a project you like and crunch away...

It is assumed that you know that you run it through BOINC. Though that topic is in the "Getting Started" section in Help:

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/help/viewTopic.do?shortName=start

Also, all the projects available is right on there front-page.

Can't know anything without registering, eh?

Personally, I prefer World Community Grid. I've been a member of the Slashdot team there since 2005 sometime.

-l

BOINC, Tor, Freenet and/or I2P are good examples of things you can put your extra resources to some use. Here are the BOINC projects I would run if I had 100's of system's at my disposal.

Artificial Intelligence System, NanoHive@Home, Predictor@Home, Project TANPAKU, Spinhenge@Home, The Lattice Project, World Community Grid, SIMAP, Malaria Control, Proteins@Home and Rosetta@Home.

As an individual, if you have to leave your machines on for some reason (to take updates or just because you might need to access it), you can feel less guilty about the wasted energy if you donate your unused cycles to look for a cure for cancer or for aliens (on the assumption the aliens' advanced technology can easily cure cancer anyway). I install a http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ agent on all machines I control (desktop, lab machines, friends' machines when they ask me to fix it for them).

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ use this instead of a screen saver and perhaps help save lives in the future

Consider also the increase in awareness of grid computing, and not just the individual apps. This led to BOINC, leading to the ease of installing and multitasking between World Community Grid, Rosetta@Home, and so many other projects with 'practical' applications that have produced real results -- projects that to date didn't have a grid computing infrastructure to harness for their needs. That infrastructure sprung from the mindshare generated by SETI@Home.

So let SETI keep searching for E.T. As far as I'm concerned, if the only thing that ever came out of Seti was SETI@Home, and the only thing of value that came out of that was BOINC, that's enough of a contribution to society to justify its continued existence.

Such a project already finished !

Help Defeat Cancer:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/projects_showcase/viewHdcResearch.do/
The site links to some related cancer projects.

Not quite. The machine learning bit comes second. You have to spend the CPU cycles to extract features from the images first. Only then can your favourite ML technique tell you if the features are predictive. The first ~1000 features (already computed, locally) show some promise, and that's why this project will explore the image feature space a bit more (~12000 features). Once we get Grid results back from our human-scored image set, any features that are a clear waste of time will be dropped.

Again, not really. The techniques selected are based heavily on our own research and on successful methods drawn from the literature. I can confirm that no Fourier analysis is done. Fourier analysis can tell you that there are high-frequency components in the image. So can simple edge detection. And a Radon transform will find the straight edges of a protein crystal. Publish your Fourier-based method of distinguishing amorphous precipitate from protein crystal, and I will include it in Phase II of the project. Before you do that, maybe also read up on wavelets.

More time = more exploration of feature space. Show me proof of a "98.5% accurate" approximation method, and I will make sure that gets in to Phase II as well.

By the way, I noticed that the "Slashdot Users" team on the World Community Grid is ranked #4. You guys are huge contributors. Whether you contribute to this project, or Dengue Fever, or whichever, thanks.

Christian Cumbaa
Research Associate
Ontario Cancer Institute

Not quite. The machine learning bit comes second. You have to spend the CPU cycles to extract features from the images first. Only then can your favourite ML technique tell you if the features are predictive. The first ~1000 features (already computed, locally) show some promise, and that's why this project will explore the image feature space a bit more (~12000 features). Once we get Grid results back from our human-scored image set, any features that are a clear waste of time will be dropped.

Again, not really. The techniques selected are based heavily on our own research and on successful methods drawn from the literature. I can confirm that no Fourier analysis is done. Fourier analysis can tell you that there are high-frequency components in the image. So can simple edge detection. And a Radon transform will find the straight edges of a protein crystal. Publish your Fourier-based method of distinguishing amorphous precipitate from protein crystal, and I will include it in Phase II of the project. Before you do that, maybe also read up on wavelets.

More time = more exploration of feature space. Show me proof of a "98.5% accurate" approximation method, and I will make sure that gets in to Phase II as well.

By the way, I noticed that the "Slashdot Users" team on the World Community Grid is ranked #4. You guys are huge contributors. Whether you contribute to this project, or Dengue Fever, or whichever, thanks.

Christian Cumbaa
Research Associate
Ontario Cancer Institute

According to the World Community Grid website:

World Community Grid is making [this] technology available only to public and not-for-profit organizations to use in humanitarian research that might otherwise not be completed due to the high cost of the computer infrastructure required in the absence of a public grid. As part of our commitment to advancing human welfare, all results will be in the public domain and made public to the global research community.

WCG uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) client, an open source software project that runs on Linux, Mac and Windows. Headline should read Open Source Software Cures Cancer ;-)

BoincStats shows you who is contributing to World Community Grid projects. Check it out...and ask yourself why you aren't contributing.

Not to mention running something like World Community Grid. I love using my idle processor time to tackle AIDS, Cancer, Muscular Dystrophy, Dengue, etc.

-l

Personally I prefer to run the World Community Grid clients currently searching for drugs for AIDS drugs, Dengue fever and Muscular Dystrophy along with a more general investigation of the Human Proteome.

I feel like SETI is an all or nothing approach at aquiring knowledge - if we are able to receive data from an alien civilisation we could learn far more in a short space of time than from research here on terra firma. It's a gamble and I think maybe we should spread our bets a bit more evenly by shifting CPU time away from SETI and onto these other projects. If just a small proportion of CPU's running SETI switched to WCG that would be a massive boost. Currently the stats show just under 200 years worth of runtime each day (so 73,000 full time clients) versus SETI's over 1.6 million clients.

Even if we did find a signal I doubt we would get much useful information from it. Mainly it would be a big cultural moment for our species.

World Community Grid does not require Windows, though I admit their website is a little confusing in that regard. If you run debian, "apt-get install boinc-client boinc-manager". Then, set it up with the BOINC instructions on the WCG website.

I'm running it on a dual-opteron amd64 debian box. You don't even have to run it in 32bit mode.

Cheers,
-l

Save the world?

I'm on Team Slashdot, FTW,
-l

It's definately better than using PCs. Blue Gene/L, which is supposed to be very efficient

• FightAIDS@Home
• Genome Comparison
• Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy
• Help Defeat Cancer
• Human Proteome Folding 2

Another grid computing project is the World Community Grid. Members have contributed over 75,000 CPU years to several projects. See the http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/.

The last time I checked there were over 260,000 members. Over 100,000 have joined a team. There is a slashdotusers team (one of the larger teams) as well as the one I am in UserFriendly.Org.

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ they've got a "help defeat cancer" program.. i run it on all my computers as the screen saver..

with gaming as another (big) feature...and call it a day...

If that doesn't work...market it as a cheap grid supercomputer! :)