Do you BOINC?

[Spoon 11th]

BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) is a distributed computing infrastructure that allows many different scientific projects' applications to run on volunteers personal computers, compute the work units using the free CPU cycles that would otherwise be wasted and then report the results back to the projects server. On average 2 GHz computer the CPU utilization is rarely more than 10% when browsing, reading mail or listening to audio player for example.

The reason I'm promoting this now is that one of the BOINC projects, Rosetta@home is participating in a competition called CASP7. The main goal of CASP is to obtain an in-depth and objective assessment of our current abilities and inabilities in the area of protein structure prediction. To this end, participants will predict as much as possible about a set of soon to be known structures. These will be true predictions, not ‘post-dictions’ made on already known structures.

On July 15th Rosetta@home project leader Dr. David Baker made this plea:

A note from David Baker:
We desperately need as much CPU power as possible for the next two weeks--there are more than 25 CASP targets due, including some that are our best shots at really high resolution models. Frustratingly, we won't be able to do anywhere near as much sampling as we had planned for these proteins as there are so many coming due near the same time, and thus can't really expect the accuracy we had hoped for. So if it is at all possible for you to increase your rosetta@home cpu time for the next two weeks please do--it will make a huge difference for our collective efforts!

CASP7 will end on August 7th, but Rosetta will continue to improve it's prediction algorithms after that. Currently the cumulative processing power of the project is ~40 TeraFLOPS, but Dr. Baker has stated that their goal is 150 TeraFLOPS so many many more participants are welcomed to join to make that goal.

If you got interested, go to Rosetta home page and read more about the project and how to join and install BOINC.

Rosetta@home home page: http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

Note: There are a few issues of concern when participating in distributed computing:

1. Your PC may overheat when running at 100% CPU utilization. For windows there is a program called ThreadMaster that can throttle down your computers CPU usage to a level, that temperature is not a problem. This throttle feature will be implemented to BOINC in a future release, but the current 5.4.9 version doesn't have it yet, so if temperature is a problem you should use ThreadMaster.

2. Your PC will consume more electricity when the CPU is fully utilized. On average this increase is 60 watts, but this too can be throttled with ThreadMaster.


CASP7 home page

BOINC home page