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Distributed Computing Applied to Medical Research
Troodon writes " BBCnews SCI/TECH has an item:
Screensavers could save lives , anouncing the team up between Parabon Computation and the US National Cancer Institute to apply the idle time of home computers in a Seti@homeesque manner, simulating the responce of cancer cells to potential drugs. The sweetner being the _option_ to receive a payment for your troubles. Other new start ups are jumping on the bandwagon, e.g. Popular Power's choice of contributing to research on
Influenza Vaccination, or making a little money with big
business. But with these companies potentially looking forward to a healthy cut in the profits of any new drugs developed etc., should us plebs look towards more honourable projects, such as trying to help research into the global warming, that all these boxes dug out retirement are going to contribute to?"
I couldn't find too much info on Parabon's homepage with regards to what sort of modelling they are doing. AFAIK (and I am a PhD grad student in molecular biology) rational drug design is a hit-and-miss business, at best. Most "rational" receptor-ligand designs are usually not optimal and need to be optimized with random methods, such as repeated rounds of in vitro selection. Not sure if the dumbed down webpage is just so that the average joe can understand what is going on, or if this is some kind of scam.
NO CARRIER
So let me get this straight, you'd rather waste cycles
I don't see myself wasting cycles at all. Mine are going to SETI. If SETI runs out of data, I might search for Golomb rulers.
than do something that at least will help a few dying children?
Read the previous reply. The "won't you help the dying children" argument is the same one as politicians use to push censorship. These projects have zero interest in the public good.
Even though you seem resigned to the fact that only one of these "biomedical profiteers" have the means to accomplish this?
That's bullshit. Plenty of academic researchers work on automatic parallelization of code. Bioinformatics is just as hot in schools as in industry. If the NIH or the HGP or some similar organization sets up such a project, I might contribute cycles, since a nonprofit can almost be trusted to use the results properly.
Need I point out that the first distributed computing project was not from a corporation?
Even though you're not risking anything other than a few nearly worthless CPU cyles, you expect them to split the payment down the middle?
Not "middle". Obviously, I don't deserve 50%. However, I might think as high as 10% (and that's an *honest* 10%, not a 10% before creative accounting is applied) should go to the lucky person who processes the key block (or be split among those who processed multiple key blocks).
If nothing else, you should be in favor of this because the promise of Big Bucks For Doing Nothing will attract a lot more people to run clients.
As a medical student, perhaps you'd like to tell me just how many key devices and medicines have been developed without the involvement of these "biomedical profiteers"?
Very well.
Transplant surgery.
Penicillin.
Vaccination.
The concept of sterile medicine.
In those last 3, you've got nearly 90% of the power of modern medicine. All developed by individuals working pretty much for the hell of it. Now, there might be companies profiting from providing gear to achieve those things; I do not find this objectionable. If someone patented the general concept of disinfection, I'd be pretty upset.
Now how many with?
To the best of my knowledge, there's nothing currently on the market that was produced by a primarily-automated process, actually. (Disclaimer: I don't know that many of the modern drugs yet.)
this particular project is worthwhile, but I'd rather produce positive results for humanity in my lifetime than cling to some utopian notions in my dreams.
And pray tell, if it is always better to abandon utopian notions and ideals because they may not match the current reality, how do you expect things to get any better?
To put it another way: Aim for mediocrity and you'll always hit the target.
The more I think about this, the more I become convinced that it is downright unethical to assist for-profit efforts to do biomedical data mining. The information extracted will be treated in a fashion that is detrimental to humanity, both spiritually and physically.
Let's forget the money for a second. Do you really want to look around twenty years from now, see the entire genome patented and restricted in public hands (with patents having been conveniently lobbied into having a life of at least 100 years), and be able to say "I helped them do this"? I don't. If a few hypothetical kids with cancer die because I tried to prevent the declaration of humanity-as-property, I think I'll be able to sleep at night.
I also have my doubts about the business model itself. Even with the obvious cryptographic techniques for protecting the integrity of the executable code and protecting the communications, companies may still be able to infer things about research efforts by competitors or tamper with other people's results. For most companies, I think it is safer and less hassles just to build their own parallel machine
Altogether, I don't see the purpose or the novelty, and I can't help but have a rather negative reaction to it all. At least, I think the company has a lot more explaining to do.
No more moderating up abuse!
no, no, no... I said a G3. Besides, if you need real power, why not pick up an xtrem mac modification. It's a 1200Mhz G4.
2 1337 4 u!
You can specify how much hard drive and memory it should use.. defaults are 100 meg hard drive space and 16 megs ram. That's quite a chunk of HD space. I wonder what it needs it for.
The site is extremely informative and you can view your stats and how much your account is worth. I especially like the fact that:
"When we begin compensating providers this Fall, you may choose to donate your earnings to a charity of your choice."
Seems like a nice little app. I think I'll keep running it.
"To ensure the integrity of results, Parabon frequently runs canary tasks. These computations have known answers. If a bad result comes back from a canary task, Parabon no longer uses that provider." Seems like a neat idea to prvent spoofing of results!
I was assuming very infrequent communication, sending email over modems every few days. If these guys can maintain direct net connectivity, the amount of overlap needed between neighboring nodes is much smaller. It would be a big win.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Seems like a large company like IBM or Microsoft could sell theirs (theoretically they could enforce the company screen-saver/distributed computer on every machine) with a guarantee of X amount of computing for Y amount of dollars. IBM should be familar with that auditing from the mainframe heydays.
But wouldn't it be more honourable if, say, they didn't patent the "cure"?
Then what's the incentive to spend billions of dollars on medical research if once you find a cure anybody can create it? Once the chemical formula for a drug is known, it can be replicated rather trivially (as opposed to finding out what it is).
Unlike free software where developers can hack code in thier free time on free operating systems while holding down a dayjob, medical research is very expensive and cannot be relegated to a hobby or leisure time filler. Equipment is expensive, doctors usually have six digit student loans (like my brother) and cannot afford to work for free, while expenses of having drugs tested and the process of having them approved by the FDA are also daunting.
It would be nice if drugs were not patented but this would result in less expensive medical research being done, and this would benefit no one.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
I'm surprised process tree didn't get mentioned in the article. they're not quite live yet, but you can join their beta group. check out www.processtree.com.
But with these companies potentially looking forward to a healthy cut in the profits of any new drugs developed etc., should us plebs look towards more honourable projects,
This is the side of the Free Software movement that makes me sick. Theres a vindictive attitude towards capitalism, and especially any capitalism that involves intellectual property.
If some drug company makes money *and* cures cancer using my CPU cycles, I'll be happy. Who knows, it might be my cancer they cure.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It could be feasible that a piece of distributed computing software could be bundled with a browser and a dial-up account in a similiar fashion to AltaVista's free service. The big difference would be that instead of banner ads taking up your screen real estate, you have to install a screen saver that crunches data. :)
The business model would then be:
Company (or research institute) needs data crunched, but does not want to pay for computers ->
Company gives data and algorithms to @home service and pays a hefty sum ->
@home service divies out the algorithms to people across the land next time they login to their free dialup account ->
Data is crunched and sent back to the @home service at a reasonable rate ->
Everybody wins
Now somebody is going to get rich off of my idea... it's really painful being this dumb.
"Blue Elf has destroyed the food!"
Because you can't, you won't, and you don't stop...
What projects are more honourable than working to find new cancer medications? Searching for ET is a noble endeavour, but in terms of relative importance, I don't think there's much comparison.
According to the Parabon download page, they are currently developing versions of their software for Linux, Mac, and other unix variants.
Go here to have them notify you when the version for the platform of your choice is ready.
Global warming is indeed propaganda of mythic proportions. However, reasoning from a cold summer to no trend of global warming is a titanic logical fallacy of the worst sort. It's just as bad as the local weatherman referring to global warming whenever there's a hot day.
I'm afraid this is going to head in the same direction as the "one click shopping" patents and the other assorted Amazon nonsense.
I mean, you look at Seti (I prefer distributed.net), and you wonder how long it is before VC's start throwing money at that model. So the question is, is there a defense against this in place? Don't kid yourself and think some suit won't try and corner it all off with a strategic patent...
[Starts scribbling a buisness plan on a napken....]
There's also an NSF study here and another study discussed on CNN in which a panel of climatologists disprove dissenters' arguments against global warming. It should be noted that most scientists nowadays believe global warming has been occurring.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I use Seti@Home, which I think is worthy, but I've given them plenty of cpu cycles and I wouldn't mind spreading that around. But I'm sure, at this point, I'd need to install a new product for any new service I'd want to use.
Wonder if someone would figure out a way to call that cpu time tax-deductible.
Every time I hear people "developing a cure for cancer" it drives me up the wall. It seems silly, in my opinion, to spend money trying to develop something that already exists. (I'm not talking about chemo or radiation or drugs. Those are obviously treatments, but they're far from being cures.)
I know this is a bit off-topic, but I feel I have to make it known in any way I can. Check out Dr. Day's site or the Gerson Institute for some examples of the ideas I'm talking about. Open your eyes.
The problem with ad-based ISPs is that, even if they create software that you can't hack to keep the ads from downloading, it's impossible to create software that you can't hack to keep the ads from displaying. With a data crunching background process ultra-niced, there is no negative impact to the user (and no annoying impact like ads), so there's no incentive to hack around the system.
Of course, a malicious user could still hack the software so that it returned garbage results, but who would want to?
Personally, even though these guys would pay me and SETI will just suck my bandwidth, I seriously doubt you'll find one of my boxes running any of these sims. (And I'm a med student, so I've got a vested interest in finding lots of new medical miracles.)
Why, you may ask, would I want to waste time looking for nonexistent little green men instead of helping the dying boy who had cancer but is now smothering under a heap of greeting cards?
Easy. We all know exactly what's going to happen when one of the simulations shows something interesting. It'll be snapped up and patented as soon as the data block hits their servers. You? You'll get a micropayment. If you're lucky, they'll mention your name. If you're the first one ever to find something useful, you'll get publicity shots. Royalties from the patent? Yeah, right. You run these screen savers and all you're doing is helping a greedy bastard get rich. (Yes, I'm sure there are some ethical and altruistic biomedical profiteers out there, but my observation is that they're mostly just bastards.)
The IP rush in biomedicine right now is scaring me. The prevailing regulatory attitude seems to be that life in general is just another resource to be locked up and exploited. I don't care how much they're paying per FLOP, I refuse to speed that process along.
What they really need is to install something like this into TiVo. Consider the computing power you could get if 80% of the VCR's in the world supported distributed computing.
I'm the CTO of Popular Power. Good discussion here, thanks! I really think this technology is neat; we can turn the Internet into a very powerful resource and then use that resource to solve important problems. Our current influenza work is contributing to research that could save millions of lives.
One poster here wondered how good this kind of distributed computer would be at biotech apps. Depends a lot on the algorithm, but for things that trivially parallelize (like random search algorithms, Monte Carlo simulations) it's a perfect match.
Popular Power has been up and running since April. We've had a Linux client out for a couple of months now; download it and try it out!
Sigh. Guess I'll have to keep looking for my parents with the Arecibo radio telescope.
Not to mention that there is still no particularly valid scientific reason to presume that global warming even exists. Or maybe, the idea is simply that the project will generate tons of greenbar printouts that can be used to "conclusively document" the terrible global threat we face.
Seriously, global warming is taken as gospel truth in so many places, but it's really quite likely that it does not exist and isn't happening - remember the same experts warning of global warming now warned of catastrophic mini-ice ages at the first earth day in 1970. They're no more likely right now than they were then, but they're just as ideologically driven as ever.
Take a good look at this primer on global warming (pay particular attention to the "seven things you should know about global warming" and globalwarming.org for more information. Then do your own more detailed research.
This is a complex issue and the evidence is not yet conclusive either way. In general, though, I am more convinced that this is a political ploy for control "to save the earth" than any sort of real phenomenon. The data I've looked at leave it quite unclear that there is any global warming trend at all - in particular, the satellite data, which is generally recognized as the most accurate, shows a slight cooling trend over the past 18 years. Even if a slight warming trend does exist, there is certainly no reason for alarm, as it is almost certainly a natural phenomenon. (As always, the chief human failing of hubris causes us to overestimate our importance and impact on the world around us - the fact is, we don't really make much difference.) The earth is not static, and it is not reasonable to expect it to be.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Most of these things are Windows only deals for a couple reasons.
They have to display ads, so they have to use graphics calls that would be nontrivial to port to Linux. A distributed computing client doesn't need anything less portable than BSD networking system calls, which I'm told Winsock is a pretty close clone of.
There's a big incentive for the user to get rid of the annoying ads, which on Linux could be as simple as starting the advertisement program set to display to a null X server (or a minimized Xnest, if like me you don't have a null server installed), or onto a different window manager desktop, etc. However a research program, nice level 20, who's going to want to hack around that?
Not all researchers use Unix, but it's got to be a hell of a lot more popular than it is among advertisers.
The various entities backing the global warming scare have done a great job of attracting numerous "scientists" to weigh in on the issue, but most of them are speaking well outside their area of expertise.
A quick look at the facts about the thoughts of scientists on this issue:
Source: http://www.heartland.org/studies/ieguide.htm#1 (includes references to their sources, too)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
With seti@home, if there were a mistake or a mixup, the worst that can happen is that we think there are LGM (Little Green Men) someplace where they are not (false positive), or to miss out on finding them where they actually are (false negative). Disappointing? Yes, that's for sure.
Now compare that to programs which would be used, for example, to test new drug therapies. Incorrect results, be they false positives or negatives could have potentially life-threatening consequences. So far, the risks here are basically the same as if they had run all the simulations on the company's own machines.
What gets me really nervous would be to think of the impact if someone hacked the downloaded code, and intentionally returned incorrect results. For example, Peter's Perfect Pills is looking to test a new drug. Signs up with this @home service to do its computations inexpensively. But, Bluto's Big Bad Bromides has a competing drug and doesn't want to lose market share. So, they offer up a bunch of THEIR computers to the service, and intentionally return incorrect results. As soon as some of the data is compromised, all data would be suspect.
Sure, they could just encrypt everything, but then the code would be inscrutable, and the virus writers could have a field day getting their programs transmitted around the world. If they send the source, instead, so I can be SURE there's no risk to MY system, then I have the tools in my hands to present a danger to THEIR results.
That said, I sure hope I'm wrong about this. Can we meet the needs for authenticity, security, and safety to all parties' systems AND to the accuracy of the processing's results? (Or has somebody already solved this problem? If so, I'd love to see a link or a reference.)
So let me get this straight, you'd rather waste cycles than do something that at least will help a few dying children? Even though you seem resigned to the fact that only one of these "biomedical profiteers" have the means to accomplish this? Even though you're not risking anything other than a few nearly worthless CPU cyles, you expect them to split the payment down the middle?
As a medical student, perhaps you'd like to tell me just how many key devices and medicines have been developed without the involvement of these "biomedical profiteers"? Now how many with? I thought so. Look, I'm not saying the world is always fair. I'm not saying everyone in the field is ethical (though I do personally know some very principled people in it). I'm not even saying this particular project is worthwhile, but I'd rather produce positive results for humanity in my lifetime than cling to some utopian notions in my dreams.
Jeez, for something that is supposed to be a distributed system, it sure isn't secure. The data being processed (from popularpower.com) or at least the code for it is stored in a jar file in either a /temp folder or a /tmp folder (depending on win32 or linux install). They are all java .class files in several packages, NONE of which is obfuscated in the least.
Some of the class names:
immune.AntiBody
immune.BCell
immune.Simulator
many others
they all reversed nicely.
Some of the code is pretty cool, I just wouldn't expect very accurate responses when the kiddies get ahold of it.
Sure, run all your computers 24/7 at 100% use to help solve Global Warming. Makes sense to me.
The more you know, the less you understand.
This is a great idea, but how secure is it going to be? I remember hearing about empty packets being sent back to both distributed.net and seti@home. If people are being paid for this, there is all the more reason to be worried about this - look at the fraud with AllAdvantage (don't use linux and doubt it's avalible for the platform 'cept through WINE - for those out of the know, many people have anti-idlers so they keep on racking up the cash overnight and not looking at the banners).
And this isn't just a relatively meaningless deal like distributed.net/seti - honestly, when compared to people's lives, how much does that matter?
Anyone have any comments?
That is a very stupid argument that global warming is a myth, unfortuately this is the level of science a lot of people use to make complex decisions on the direction of science policy in the US (and likely other countries as well).
;).
There are reasons to think global warming is going to be a problem, however direct evidence or even accurate models are hard to come by because of the difficulty of dealing with a problem as complex as planetary scale climate modelling.
The question is at what point are the future costs which may occur due to global warming outweigh the advantages of using cheap fossil fuels, and how good are our predictive models which we are relying on to attempt to make this decision.
Right now our models aren't great and we are trying to examine what the effects will be at a substantially distant point in the future. These things combine to make it hard to convince the average person that this is something important to think about.
There was a very good Frontline/Nova report on this issue a few months ago which explained the problem in detail, and showed the rather convincing evidence seen. Also it was interesting to see the extremist points of view;
big oil: no problem what's all the fuss about
enviromentalist: no power generation except solar and wind
The energy production of solar and wind generation are currently, and as far as can be predicted in the future, not efficeint enough to produce our energy need in a reasonable amount of space (and land in expensive), the density is simply too low.
They also explained why nuclear fission isn't a cure all because the fuel supply is too limited.
The conclusion was that global warming if it occurs as predicted will force a reduction in fossil fuel usage within the next century, where if global warming were not an issue these fuels would be substantially gone in 2 or so centuries. Thus the global warming issues move the date when we need to have other means to supply our energy needs up by a century.
Only a new technology which avoids these problems will prevent this crisis from occuring. One example is fusion energy production, unfortunately this has been 40 years away for about 50 years. Maybe nano technology will solve this problem after all its only 40 years away
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Sorry, but wind power is one of the most ecologically atrocious power sources known, and is very strongly opposed by the Sierra Club (which calls windpower windmills the "Cuisinarts of the air") and the Audubon Society among others.
Fact: A 1992 study commissioned by the CEC (California Energy Commision) "conservatively" estimated that 39 golden eagles were being killed at Altamont Pass each year, a significant figure given a total population of 500 breeding pairs. On a percentage basis, the mortality rate per year at Altamont Pass under the estimate is eight times greater than the bald eagle kill from the Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound in 1989, and it recurs every year.
It isn't some big government conspiracy that keeps alternative energy sources from flourishing, but simply that their efficiency and "greenness" isn't nearly what their promoters would have you believe.
There are substantial ecological drawbacks to many alternative/"renewable" energy schemes, including wind, hydroelectric, solar, biomass, geothermal, and even conservation-based "negawatss". These drawbacks are often completely ignored by the proponents of these schemes, who usually stand to make a good pile of money themselves if they can get the government to fund their "green" proposal - such funding is required because none of these options can currently stnad on its own merit economically.
Again, this is a complex issue, but for a great review of the ecological dangers of wind in particualr and some others as well, read the very thorough Cato report Renewable Energy - Not Cheap, Not "Green" (Source of the fact quoted above, includes thier source for the information.)
If you're worried about Cato's rightward tilt, notice the number of environmentalist sources they use to make their argument, including a 1995 expose in SF Weekly.
The birds thank you!
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Bring on the competition!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Now, look at CPU time the same way. A company buys a batch of computers. CPU time is expensive - many people don't have enough. Outside of business hours the computers are idle (during business hours they're not always at 100% load either). The company needs a way to recover CPU time that would otherwise be lost. Run a program like this one and resources are fully untilised even during off-peak times. Everyone wins because limited resources are being used more efficently.
Broadly these projects (S@h, D.net, et al) aren't new and innovative in and of themselves - they're inevitable, including commercial ones. The innovative bit is in getting them to actually work.
This does, however, bring up an interesting point. When a computer is off, it's time is being wasted, but when it's on it's drawing power. (This is true to a lesser extent with CPU load too.) The cost of participating in these projects is not zero. The micropayments would have to at least offset the increase in power bill.
Nothing has hit us for about 60 million years,
Actually, odds are good that we'll have visible meteors while I'm writing this message. But that's just a pretty light in the sky, right?
We had a larger meteor hit the atmosphere in 1990, exploding with the force of 10 kilotons of TNT. No damage was done over the central Pacific, but a hit over a populated area or over a trigger-happy nuclear power might be a different story. But you're probably only concerned with land impacts.
Fragments of a 100 kiloton energy 1947 impact actually reached earth near Vladivostok, leaving over a hundred craters. If it had hit populated land, life would have sucked, but it's still not a "city-killer".
And the Tunguska impact, wacky black hole theories to the contrary, was most likely an impact by a comet fragment volatile enough to burn up in the atmosphere, but large enough (40-100 m) to cause the 20 megaton explosion that leveled thousands of kilometers of forest, killed unlucky wildlife, and broke windows over 100 kilometers away. This is a "city-killer" projectile, and we think there's about a 1/1000 chance that one will hit land in a given year.
Not as flashy as the "asteroid the size of Texas" bullshit that sells movie tickets, but it does have the potential to cause a couple million deaths, which isn't small change.
But are we doing anything about it? We may be tracking more than 10% (and there's a confidence-inspiring figure!) of kilometer-diameter Earth-crossing objects, but I don't know what kind of tracking if any occurs around the 100 meter size range.
and it's debatable that it even happened then!
Look at a freaking astronomy book sometime! Ever notice that every single airless body has craters hundreds of miles wide? Ever wonder what that kind of impact would do to an ecosystem? Did you even see any pictures of the Shoemaker-Levy impact last decade? Do fireballs larger than Earth ring a bell?
And the dinosaur-killer impact was just the one that gets media attention. We've had mass extinctions every 100 million years or so; approximately the same frequency with which we'd expect 10 kilometer asteroids to strike Earth.
That's not a coincidence.
SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Where the hell is this hostility coming from? The original poster said nothing that you could possibly take offense at. Have so many people in the real world expressed disgust at your ignorance that you have to take out repressed anger anonymously on the internet?
Convection. At least in the troposphere (lower atmosphere). In fact, the gas mixture in the atmosphere is not segregated by "weight" at all.... Back in the 19th century is was popular to postulate that space travel was impossible because, by the logic of lighter gasses rising, the entire upper atmosphere would be comprised of hydrogen, and any attempt to send a rocket through the statosphere would cause the atmosphere to explode. Glad we got over that myth...
The earth has been heating and cooling down naturally for millions of years.
Yes, but at a much more gradual rate. The slow rate of natural change allows ecosystems the opportunity to change or migrate. If the temperature rises 3 degrees over several generations of spruce trees, forests of those trees have the opportunity to migrate northward or upward. If it happens in only 100 years, those trees dry up, burn down or get eaten by bud worm. The tides are natural cycles too, but that doesn't mean I'm happy about tsunamis!
2 1337 4 u!
Drug companies are only in it for the money, just like everyone else.
Christ... am I cynical or what?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
In the matter of shoes I deffer to the cobbler. These guys are the cobblers.
2 1337 4 u!
Last year, I group of us at school (U of Michigan) did a project to do generic distributed computing... We didn't do anything with the project after the semester but maybe it could be revived now... It's basically a client-server system to apply distributed computing to different tasks..... the URL for the project homepage is here
But for the cool factor, let's all beat a path to those download sites...
Here's how it works:
::
1.)2 hours of cpu time : 4 cents.
2.)1 block of data : 25 cents.
3.)1 Cured Disease: 100,000,000 Dollars.
Ok, Count me in.
-Swift
-Swift
I'm not a biochemist, so I can't say for sure, but it seems to me like running a complete sim of that type in a screensaver is a bit, shall we say, ambitious? That leaves parting them out, which is exactly the kind of process that clusters are poor at. If every atom in the simulation is bouncing off of an atom that 'lives' on another user's machine, modem-speed latencies will kill the whole thing.
In a recent discussion in this space about SETI@home, one of the threads was something along the lines of:
To which an astute poster replied something like:
Uh-oh.
So do we now all have a moral obligation to dump SETI@home?
-
-
Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
"..the huge success of the Seti.." Have they actually found any alien intelligence?
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
Well, my ignorance is bigger so my question would not be "How accurate is it?" but "How does it do that kind of simulation?". I've been looking at the Popular Power website and their explanation of the influenza project is too brief. I think that a lot of people would like to know what is it that their machines are running. This may not be possible in commercial projects but this one is non-profit, so, guys at Popular Power, how about some additional info and/or links about how the simulation is performed, what kind of algorithm is used, how does this fit in the whole search fot the yearly vaccinations, how doctors use the info my machine produces, etcetera? Take example fromn distributed.net, they give plenty of additional references to consult.
"All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams". Elias Canetti
Oops, here's a link to some info on that Nova/Frontline report
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1. Buy a G3 or (eventually) crusoe. Significantly more efficient than those nasty pentiums (pentii?)
2. Sign up for your local utilities optional windpower program.
3. Your local utility doesn't offer wind or solar? Well, replace step two with "harass your local utility till they give you the choice to get pinwheel power".
There. You're set.
2 1337 4 u!
Look, big medical companies have deep pockets.
If they wanted a 10,000 node beowolf cluster of desktop PCs, they would buy it. (and get use out of the machines 24/7)
These screensavers are great for groups like SETI that may not have quite the same resources, but this isn't likely going to become a breakthrough in medical research.
cot
Well, IMHO, no.
As you stated later in the comment, picking screensavers may one day be like picking charities. You're giving something away, even if in this case it's an intangible. That said, it's an act of giving, not one of selling.
While a winning 'reward' might be an incentive to join, I don't see a financial 'lure' as being positive, since it may lead to people attempting to process blocks faster, possibly at the expense of correctness of data.
That said, people who give away their free cycles probably are due something. Currently, most distributed projects are non-profit in any case, so the point may be moot, but what about having a commercial company that relied on a distributed approach for one of their products donate a percentage of profits resulting from said computations to the charity of their choice? (or better yet, other non-profit distributed projects)?
I could see that as being fairer than a 'lottery', or no feedback into the system at all.
But if there were things to choose from, people who want one specific advancement can choose from a selection.
This could be very good and very cool.
Think about it. Many people who choose SETI@Home over Distributed.net aren't just choosing it due to the visuals, but because they want to find aliens. I, myself, would love to find aliens. But I think there would be a greater chance of, say, curing cancer.
I'd love to be able to setup my computer to:
- Search for prime numbers for one week
- Help find a cure for cancer the second
- Help find aliens the third
- etc
Or one could just choose to dedicate all of their cycles to one thing that they really want to see happen.
The idea is cool obviously, but frought with ethical dilemmas.
Does the company owe the person whose computer discovered the drug anything? If so, someone is eventually going to win a computational lottery. If not (at least in U.S. versions of this) you could easily get some eldery person unable to afford the very drug their computer researched.
I can easily see the day when picking your screen saver will be almost as challenging as picking the charities you choose to support.
And why shouldn't I get credit, or a share of the profits? If I devote my personal resources to a project and end up contributing something of massive value, why is it unfair to expect a massive return? It's not like the company will go bankrupt if they offer a small percentage, and even a small percentage of a major drug's sales is a huge sum of money (for most of us).
The point is you haven't contributed something of massive value. Your computer is only one unit of a massive number cruncher. If your computer didn't do the work, the packet would be sent to the next computer in the line and they would crack the final code. That's not a massive contribution - it's nothing.
Let me put it this way. Say I own a theme park and to break even I need 1000 visitors to go through the turnstiles. When Visitor 1000 walks through my gates, I will have broken even and paid for my theme park. That is a significant visitor that has stepped through - it marks a momentous occassion - but did that visitor contribute anything? No way! If Visitor 1000 had died just before they paid for their entry ticket, I wouldn't give two hoots about it. Visitor 1001 would be the one to make be break even.
For the same reason, your 'effort' in helping to find the cure for cancer is no more important than Visitor 1000 - that is, not important at all.
I have to wonder, wouldn't it be possible for people to mess with the results, thus returning false positives and false negatives? How would such a thing be checked for? Would there be random double-checking so that if one person screwed up, the project wouldn't suffer?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased