BOINC, Rosetta@home and COVID-19

in #covid194 years ago


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Most reading this are probably already aware of BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). If not, here's a short history...

Back in 1999, a project was born at Berkeley called seti@home to harness the power of thousands of PCs to search for aliens. It was basically a screensaver that anyone could download. It would download a bit of radio telescope data from Arecibo and analyze it for possible signals and display a visual representation as a screen saver. This led to another project called BOINC. Whereas seti@home was a standalone program, BOINC was a framework through which any number of similar distributed computing projects could be created. Users could participate in one or many. Seti@home was just the first.

Other distributed projects came along that used BOINC including Einstein@home (search for pulsars), Rosetta@home (protein folding simulation that potentially helps find cures for diseases), World Community Grid (multiple medical research projects), Milkyway@home (model the galaxy), Asteroids@home (hunt for asteroids) and many others.

Recently, Rosetta@home has started modeling the COVID-19 virus. So if you want to use your computers idle cpu cycles to help hunt for a potential cure, head over to https://boinc.berkeley.edu/ and download BOINC for your computer. Once installed, when prompted choose Rosetta@home as your project (you can also add any number of other projects that you find interesting).

Check out https://www.hpcwire.com/2020/03/24/rosettahome-rallies-a-legion-of-computers-against-the-coronavirus/ and https://boinc.bakerlab.org/ for more information.


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