Should You BOINC?

Climateprediction.net, or CPDN, is a distributed computing project to investigate and reduce uncertainties in climate modelling. It aims to do this by running hundreds of thousands of different models (a large climate ensemble) using the donated idle time of ordinary personal computers, thereby leading to a better understanding of how models are affected by small changes in the many parameters known to influence the global climate.[1]

The project relies on the volunteer computing model using the BOINC framework where voluntary participants agree to run some processes of the project at the client-side in their personal computers after receiving tasks from the server-side for treatment.

CPDN, which is run primarily by Oxford University in England, has harnessed more computing power and generated more data than any other climate modelling project.[2] It has produced over 100 million model years of data so far.[3] As of December 2010[update], there are more than 32,000 active participants from 147 countries with a total BOINC credit of more than 14 billion, reporting about 90 teraflops (90 trillion operations per second) of processing power.[4]
~~ Source: Wikipedia Climateprediction.net article

Recent Changes Leave Linux Orphans

We are sorry, they say. Our latest models run only on Windows right now. We hope to fix this soon. We hope you will run other BOINC Projects until we get this fixed. MilkyWay@home is one such project. See You can help

True Story

Way back before BOINC I was running Seti@home on three platforms using IBM ThinkPads in the P166 class. I had a ThinkPad 760XL running Linux, a ThinkPad 760XD running OS/2 and a ThinkPad 760E running Windows 98. All had 104Mb of RAM. The Linux computer and the OS/2 computer running the command line version could turn a workunit around in four to five days running 24/7. The Windows 98 machine took more than one month to complete a similar workunit. I never did another on Windows. I was afraid that the aliens would move to a different planet by the time it was done.

Posted by The GNUinator

You can help map this

• Introduction to BOINC
• Old … Never Die They Just BOINC Away
• People’s Astronomy
• Volunteers Find Rare Pulsar MAYBE

Roughly 22% of all discarded computers are disposed of properly. Too many wind up in landfills where they harm the environment. In some cases IC boards are shipped off to third world countries to be melted down in 55 gallon drums. This releases a toxic soup. Colorado presently has no regulation concerning proper disposal of e-waste. This may change.

BOINC Extends Useful Life of Working Computers

My argument is that Windows should be blown off the hard drive and replaced with Linux. There are many Linux Distributions which are easy on old hardware. My own particular favorite is Slackware Once linux installation is done you are ready to participate in a new adventure.

What is MilkyWay@home?

Milkyway@Home uses the BOINC platform to harness volunteered computing resources, creating a highly accurate three dimensional model of the Milky Way galaxy using data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This project enables research in both astroinformatics and computer science.

In computer science, the project is investigating different optimization methods which are resilient to the fault-prone, heterogeneous and asynchronous nature of Internet computing; such as evolutionary and genetic algorithms, as well as asynchronous newton methods. While in astroinformatics, Milkyway@Home is generating highly accurate three dimensional models of the Sagittarius stream, which provides knowledge about how the Milky Way galaxy was formed and how tidal tails are created when galaxies merge.

For more about this and other Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) projects: Choosing BOINC Projects

Posted by The GNUinator

Open-source software for volunteer computing and desktop grid computing

Fascinating story over the weekend from Bruce Allen . A volunteer in Iowa and one in Germany running BOINC , Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing application software for Einstein@home found a pulsar, sometimes referred to as a black hole in space. Not just any pulsar thank you. Scientists aren’t sure yet but they think it could be a disrupted recycled pulsar. These are very rare. You can keep track of developments on this story by following the Einstein@home website.

Here is a quote from the story.

I want to share some good news with you.

For more than a year, Einstein@Home has been using about
one-third of the available computer time to search for radio
pulsars in data from the Arecibo Observatory. I’m happy to report
that we found our first radio pulsar last month: PSR J2007+2722.
It is still not sure, but this appears to be a rare type of object
called a Disrupted Recycled Pulsar. The discovery was published
on-line by the journal Science, on Thursday August 12th.

Congratulations to our volunteers Chris and Helen Colvin (Ames, Iowa,
USA) and Daniel Gebhardt (Universitaet Mainz, Musikinformatik, Germany),
whose computers discovered the pulsar with the highest significance!

Further details of this first Einstein@Home discovery may be found
in the main news item posted on the Einstein@Home web site, at
http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/ . You can also use Google News
and similar searches, with keywords like ‘pulsar’ or ‘J2007+2722′
or ‘Einstein@Home’ to find recent news articles about the
discovery, in English, German, French, Spanish, Russian and other
languages.

See People’s Astronomy on this blog for some amazing things that volunteers are doing. See Introduction to BOINC to find out how to get started.

See Old 770Zs Never Die for the connection between old computers (running Linux) and worthwhile science projects.

You will also find a reference to General Douglas MacArthur whose famous “old soldiers never die” comment to Congress in April 1951 inspired the title.

Connection to net neutrality

Public interest groups such as American Library Association support network neutrality.

Network Neutrality (or “net” neutrality) is the concept of online non-discrimination. It is the principle that consumers/citizens should be free to get access to – or to provide – the Internet content and services they wish, and that consumer access should not be regulated based on the nature or source of that content or service. Information providers – which may be websites, online services, etc., and who may be affiliated with traditional commercial enterprises but who also may be individual citizens, libraries, schools, or nonprofit entities – should have essentially the same quality of access to distribute their offerings. “Pipe” owners (carriers) should not be allowed to charge some information providers more money for the same pipes, or establish exclusive deals that relegate everyone else (including small noncommercial or startup entities) to an Internet “slow lane.” This principle should hold true even when a broadband provider is providing Internet carriage to a competitor.

Thanks to the American Library Association for that quote. The ‘professional left’ whoever they are are afraid that big corporations are going to ruin the Internet. The anti-intellectual right thinks that net neutrality is a plot by the Obama administration.

For the moment let us stop the political rhetoric and look at net neutrality in practical terms as related to volunteers running BOINC work units. Volunteers do not expect to make any money. The organizations running the science projects i.e. universities, Laboratories, agencies, etc. do not have extra money to guarantee fast Internet access. Guess who loses if network neutrality dies.

Posted by The GNUinator

SETI Telescope

Public Debate: “Are We Alone?” Watch the Video

SETI@home Chief Scientist Dan Werthimer participated in an exciting public debate with planet-hunter and skeptic Geoff Marcy on April 30, 2010 on campus of the University of California at Berkeley. The topic: “Are We Alone?” covered the range of issues related to the search for extraterrestrial life. Watch the video transcript here.

Posted by The GNUinator

SETI Telescope

In E&T’s second International Year of Astronomy feature, we discover that destinations for future space missions may be decided not by agencies like NASA, but by groups of ordinary people engaged in citizen computing.

Question: what kind of person does it require to detect gravity waves in the universe, or calculate the 46th prime number? If your guess is a doctoral-degree holding scientist or mathematician, you are incorrect.

We live in a world where cutting-edge technical research can be done at home. Now, with nothing but a computer with an Internet connection, any user can participate in over 50 ‘citizen-science’ projects around the world. They are for amateur astronomers, ordinary people, groups of volunteers, or even anonymous users.

I found this article on the SETI@home website.

You can access the entire article at The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The only thing I would add is that I like to participate in these projects by using a computer running Linux rather than Windows. The reason is that Linux has a lower overhead for the operating system so more of your resources go into doing the actual calculations required to get the job done.

Posted by The GNUinator

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing

Recently we published Introduction to BOINC which said that older computers could be useful for processing Berkeley Open Infrastructure For Network Computing, BOINC, work units. These computers, retrofitted with Linux instead of Windows can contribute to the public good by looking for pulsars in outer space, searching for life on other planets, studying protein folding, finding new prime numbers and so forth. Indeed, Linux User and Developer Magazine from the UK devoted a cover story to BOINC some years ago. They called BOINC responsible peer to peer networking, as contrasted with irresponsible peer to peer networking which is associated with theft of copyrighted music, etc.

When I was in high school General Dougles MacArthur appeared before a joint session of Congress. MacArthur had just been fired by President Truman over the issue of supremacy of civilian authority over military leaders.

MacArthur concluded an emotional presentation by recalling a song they used to sing at West Point.

For months afterward Old Soldiers Never Die, They Just Fade Away was a hit song.

How does this apply to BOINC? Well I happen to have two IBM ThinkPad 770Zs. They are Pentium II machines with 320MB of ram, they run at 366MHz and their operating system is Slackware Linux/GNU. One of them processes Einstein at Home work units. The typical work unit will take about five days to complete on a 770Z. The cycle is get a work unit – process it – upload the result – get another work unit. The objective is to run the wheels off until the machine dies of old age or fatigue.

The other 770Z processes Prime Grid work units. This BOINC project looks for new prime numbers of the form K*B^N+/-1 and B^N+/-K and other kinds of prime numbers.

Do I have any idea what these number forms mean? Well, frankly no I do not. I do know that prime numbers are used in computer security and for other useful purposes. That is the idea behind BOINC. The volunteers who contribute unused CPU cycles are not required to know the science involved. They just need to be willing to help out. Frankly I think this is a better use of old computers then having them thrown in land fills.

Posted by The GNUinator

We Have Links

Astronomy Picture of The Day was added in honor of my sister. See Sis You’re No Valley Girl on this blog. Our links are divided into Blogroll, Public Interest, and Science and Stuff which includes computer science, BOINC, climate science, wind, and other things. Notice the link for Junk Science Judo. This material was produced by The Cato Institute and I think it is valuable. More recent material produced by The Cato Institute seems to me to be excessively negative.

I am struck by the number of bloggers appearing on cable television. For example on Howard Kurtz’s Reliable Sources on CNN there appeared Jeff Jarvis blogger at Buzz Machine as well as John Aravosis blogger at America Blog. I’m happy to have both on my blogroll. Speaking of happy, I was glad to see Jane Hamsher, blogger at Fire Dog Lake, on The Rachel Maddow show recently.

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Follow @GypsyChief

Open-source software for volunteer computing and desktop grid computing

Use the idle time on your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research. It’s safe, secure, and easy:

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Well yes downloading and installing the BOINC client software is simple. There is more to this than you might think.

For one thing, processing BOINC work units can get competitive really quick. There are teams all over the world vying to produce more completed BOINC work units than any other team. For another, one may participate in multiple BOINC projects at once.

In addition, participation in BOINC projects has implications for the use of old computers. I define old computers as computers which originally shipped with some version of Windows. From time to time Microsoft announces End of Life for Windows versions such as Windows 98 for example.

What happens to a computer with an old no longer supported version of Windows? Computer professionals have struggled with this question for years. It has been estimated that only 22% of discarded computers are disposed of properly. Too many of them end up in landfills where they harm the environment.

One answer I think, is to put them in strong hands and set them to work producing BOINC work units.

When I say strong hands I mean blow Windows off the hard drive and install some Linux distribution instead. I do not mean this as an anti-Microsoft rant. Consider this. Older versions of Windows were never too secure so they are not very safe on the Internet. After End of Life announcement the third party addons like Zone Alarm and AdAware stop being supported as well. These old computers lack the horsepower to run a newer version of Windows. That is just a fact. But these old computers will run Linux.
Slackware is one Linux distribution which works well with older hardware.

You may have heard of SETI@home, that is, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligience. This is the original project in which the University of California asked for the public’s help to perform calculations needed in the search for life on other planets. Hundreds of thousands of people responded worldwide. Years later the university decided to scrap the original SETI@home client software and to replace it with BOINC client software which could be used to support network computing on a variety of scientific projects.

Today one such effort is the BBC Climate Prediction project where users run thousands of simulations to see what is the effect of small changes in sulphur or carbon dioxide.

This is an ambitious project which requires much dedication as a single climate prediction model can run on your computer for months. In this case an obsolete computer will not do – you need something with more horsepower. However, old computers can still do lots of good things. I have, for example Pentium III computers which produce Einstein at home work units. These look for pulsars in space.

Press always gets it wrong

Why is this post categorized as ‘the press always gets it wrong’? Well, you might remember that CNN produced a special report asking ‘is anyone out there?’ … an intriguing question. The report focused on the SETI Institute. The executive director was interviewed and SETI raw data collection was shown. What was not discussed was SETI@home where thousands of regular computer users donate unused CPU cycles to process the raw data at no cost to the SETI Institute or the American taxpayers. Dan Brown (The DaVinci Code, etc) described SETI as a government boondoggle. That is his opinion, but he didn’t say a thing about SETI@home.

Posted by The GNUinator