WCGrid News and Talking Points!!

[phill]

I think we should have a go

 

[Arjai]

A Graduation, a Paper, and a Continuing Search for the Help Stop TB Researchers


By: Dr. Anna Croft
University of Nottingham, UK

28 Sep 2018

Summary
In this update, principal investigator Dr. Anna Croft shares two recent milestones for the Help Stop TB research team, and discusses their continuing search for additional researchers.

The Help Stop TB (HSTB) project uses the massive computing power of World Community Grid to examine part of the coating of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. We hope that by learning more about the mycolic acids that are part of this coating, we can contribute to the search for better treatments for tuberculosis, which is one of the world's deadliest diseases.

Graduation Ceremony for Dr. Athina Meletiou
In recent news for the HSTB project, Dr. Athina Meletiou has now officially graduated. It was a lovely day, finished off with some Pimms and Lemonade in the British tradition.

​

Search for New Team Members Continues
We are still looking for suitably qualified chemists, biochemists, mathematicians, engineers and computer scientists to join our team, especially to develop the new analytical approaches (including machine-learning approaches) to understand the substantial data generated by the World Community Grid volunteers.

We will be talking to students from our BBSRC-funded doctoral training scheme in the next few days and encouraging them to join the project. Click here for more details.

Paper Published
Dr. Wilma Groenwald, one of the founding researchers for the HSTB project, recently published a paper describing some of the precursor work to the project. The paper, which discusses the folding behavior of mycolic acids, is now freely available on ChemRXiv.

We hope to have Athina’s first papers with World Community Grid data available later in the year, and will keep you updated.

Thank you to all volunteers for your support.

Congratulations Athina!! Great job, Dr. !!

This is the full article, from HERE.

 

[Arjai]

Outsmart Ebola Together Ends Current Phase of Work to Process Data, Look for Additional Collaborators


By: Dr. Erica Ollmann Saphire, PhD
The Scripps Research Institute
3 Oct 2018

Summary
The Outsmart Ebola Together research team is moving on to the data analysis phase of the project. Read more in this message from principal investigator Dr. Erica Ollmann Saphire.

Dear Volunteers,

Your response to Outsmart Ebola Together has been terrific, and you have returned more than 350 million results to help find new drug targets against Ebola virus. Thank you!

We now have more than enough data to analyze to find new directions for antiviral drugs. So, we are ending this phase of the project to finish processing the suggestions your computers, phones, and tablets have sent us.

We will be stopping work on World Community Grid in the next three or four weeks.

We will be in touch with more information and results!


Erica Ollmann Saphire

Rest of the info, HERE.

 

[Arjai]

Planned Maintenance on Thursday, October 11


8 Oct 2018

Summary

We are updating the operating system on our servers on Thursday, October 11, beginning at 14:00 UTC.

We will be applying an important operating system update to our servers on Thursday, October 11, beginning at 14:00 UTC. We anticipate that the work will take approximately four hours.

During some of this time, volunteers will not be able to upload or download new work, and the website will not be accessible.

Volunteers will not need to take any particular action, as your devices will automatically retry their connections after the maintenance work is completed.

Attached in full. Original message, HERE.

 

[Arjai]

New Version of World Community Grid for Mac and Windows Now Available for Download

22 Oct 2018

Summary
Volunteers can now upgrade to version 7.14.2 of the software that runs World Community Grid.
We're happy to announce an updated version of the software which runs World Community Grid. You can begin to install the upgrade here.

Background
World Community Grid uses the BOINC open source project as the underlying software for running our research projects. The BOINC project periodically releases new versions of the software to add features and fix bugs.
Every few years, World Community Grid conducts a security review and performs our own additional testing on top of the existing BOINC community testing of the software. Once we have completed these steps, we then adopt that new version as the version that we recommend and provide as a download to our volunteers. The previous version of the software that we recommended was version 7.2, which was released in 2014.

What's the difference between the new and old versions?
We're adopting this new version because it's easier for new users get the software installed and running on their systems. Previously, users would have to come to our website, register, download the software, install it, and then enter their user name and password into the software in order to complete the process. The new version eliminates the last step in the process; once the software is installed, it should automatically connect with the user's account on our website.
We are also providing a World Community Grid-branded version of the BOINC client for both Windows and Mac. (Previously, we only provided this for Windows).

For more information
If you are curious about other changes in the software, you can read the release notes on the BOINC website.
We encourage all volunteers to upgrade to the latest version. If you have any questions about this upgrade, please free to ask questions on our website in the forum thread we've created for this release on our website.

Release Notes for BOINC 7.14





Previous version: release notes for version 7.12.
Changes in 7.14

• Mac: screensaver works with OS 10.14 Mojave
• Mac: screensaver works with dual-GPU MacBook Pro running OS 10.13+
• Mac installer: don't overwrite project list if newer
• Fix GPU detection when run with --detach_console or using $PATH
• Update NVIDIA GPU detection for recent models
• Change simple prefs dialog behavior to match advanced
• If using a dynamic account manager, show AM user name in Manager rather than randomly-generated project account names
• Move new-version URLs from cc_config.xml to nvc_config.xml (so that WCG can customize)

Copied in its entirety, from HERE

 

[phill]

Does anyone notice any performance increases/decreases with any updates to Boinc? What version does everyone run now?

Just done a quick test for my laptop I crunch with at work.. Here's my results

After a few runs the scores went higher for me, on the integer MIPS, around 8200.. Would be interesting to know if anyone else has had a increase or decrease

 

[Arjai]

Shining a Beacon for Science

13 Nov 2018

Summary
Scientists, and science itself, are facing increasing challenges in many parts of the world. To mark World Community Grid's 14th anniversary, we're asking you to publicly show your support for science on social media, in our forum, and on your own website or blog.

​

Science and scientists are under attack all over the world. Fields such as climate research, drug discovery, and environmental protection are increasingly politicized. Once-certain sources of research funding are shrinking or disappearing.

But World Community Grid has been a beacon for science to people who understand the need for continuing research since it was created in 2004. What started out as a relatively small,short-term proof of concept initiative has grown into a major source of computing power for 29 (and counting) humanitarian scientific research projects. So far, this has led to breakthrough discoveries for childhood cancer, water filtration, and renewable energy, as well as many smaller discoveries that may one day lead to future breakthroughs.

This is only possible because of generous people around the globe who donate their unused computing power to research, and scientists who have the patience and skill to tackle thorny problems that have no obvious answers.

We're inviting everyone involved with World Community Grid to shine a beacon for science on November 16, which is our 14th anniversary. You can do this by:

• Creating your own social media posts on your favorite platform (tag us on Twitter or Facebook so we can say thanks, and use the hashtag #Beacon4Science)
• Posting your thoughts about being involved in World Community Grid in our forum
• Sharing our Facebook post and/or retweeting our tweets on November 16
• Sending us an email with your thoughts at beacon@worldcommunitygrid.org

Feel free to include pictures or videos, especially if they're science or World Community Grid-related.
We'd like to share the thoughts and stories of those who give us permission, to let the scientists we work with–and any other supporters of humanitarian scientific research–know that they have friends around the world.

Thanks for helping us shine a beacon for science since 2004.

 

[Arjai]

Let Your Computer Daydream Protein Structures: The Microbiome Immunity Project's 1st Full Year

By: Dr. Tomasz Kosciolek, Dr. Doug Renfrew, and Dr. Tommi VatanenUC San Diego,
Flatiron Institute, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

11 Dec 2018

Summary
Researchers from three leading scientific institutions are collaborating to explore the proteins in the human microbiome. Learn more about how they work together, and what they've accomplished at the end of the project's first full year, in this update.

Background

Trillions of bacteria live inside and on our bodies. The Microbiome Immunity Project is using the computational power of World Community Grid to study the proteins produced by these bacteria, which are encoded in their genomes.

Our first step is to determine the physical structures (shapes) of the protein molecules coded by each bacteria’s genes. This is important because the physical structure of a protein determines its function.

Once the protein functions are determined, we can explore how the bacterial proteins react with each other, and determine which proteins may play a role in autoimmune diseases such as Type 1 diabetes, ulcerative colitis, and Crohn’s disease.

We’ve created three short videos, one from each institution working on the project, to give you more information about how the project works, what we’ve done so far, and what we hope to accomplish with the help of your donated computing power.

Our Progress So Far

In this video, Dr. Tomasz Kosciolek of the University of San Diego gives an update on the project’s progress to-date. Look for a summary slide at 0:34, and don’t miss the bison! (Please note that the number of proteins listed on the summary slide is as of October; the project has predicted the structures of additional proteins since then.)

Predicting the 3D Structures of Proteins

Below, Dr. Doug Renfrew of the Flatiron Institute explains how your computing power is helping the research team predict the 3D structure of proteins, and summarizes why this is important. (And he does it all in about 90 seconds.)

The Human Microbiome’s Role in Disease

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard is where microbiome protein research and medical research intersect. In this video, Dr. Tommi Vatanen outlines what we do and don’t know right now about the human microbiome’s role in certain diseases…and what we hope to find out, with your help.

Thank You

Everyone who donates their unused computing power is an important part of the Microbiome Immunity Project. We couldn’t do it without you!

​

 

[Arjai]

OpenZika Team Adds New Resources to Continue Massive Data Analysis

I will edit this post tomorrow...just noticed it and I need sleep

 

[Arjai]

OpenZika Team Adds New Resources to Continue Massive Data Analysis

By: The OpenZika research team

20 Dec 2018

Summary
New research models, a new student, new publications, new collaborations, and continuing data analysis are all detailed in this comprehensive update from the OpenZika research team.

Current Lab Work

Dr. Carolina Andrade’s research team, LabMol, is working on analyzing the data generated by OpenZika project. Dr. Melina Mottin is leading this task.

We are analyzing the virtual screen from OpenZika against the ZIKV NS5 protein, a key viral enzyme that is required for the virus to mature and form infectious viral particles. The full-length NS5 protein contains two domains, representing two distinct targets: the NS5 methyltransferase and NS5 polymerase. NS5 methyltransferase domain methylates, or attaches methyl (CH3) radicals to, the RNA cap structure; and NS5 polymerase domain synthesizes the viral RNA, and is thus essential to ZIKV survival and establishment of the infection in host cells.

We are being assisted by other Brazilian researchers, who are helping to analyze the big data generated by the docking calculations from World Community Grid. Professor Roosevelt Alves da Silva (Federal University of Goias), Dr. Joao H. Martins Sena (Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, FIOCRUZ), and Dr. Pedro Torres (University of Cambridge) are helping Dr. Mottin and the LabMol team to handle the massive amount of data we have been generating. Also, our new Master’s student, Bruna Souza, is being trained by Dr. Mottin. She is already analyzing the data and preparing reports.

​

Dr. Mottin spent almost a month as a visiting researcher at Dr. Sean Ekins’ lab in North Carolina. She worked on Bayesian and Random Forest models for Zika, dengue and Ebola using publicly available data. The main goal of this work was to develop and implement these models to help increase the efficiency of the final selection of the compounds to test against the viruses. (For example, we can build a machine learning model for Zika and related flaviviruses that could help predict which compounds are more likely to have whole-cell activity, which will complement our target-based docking in OpenZika.) Models are now being optimized with new datasets obtained from the literature and databases such as ChEMBL and PubChem, to build new and more robust machine learning models for predicting activity for Zika and dengue viruses.

New Candidate Inhibitors Recently Discovered

We recently finished analyzing a virtual screen from OpenZika against the ZIKV NS2B/NS3 protease, a key viral enzyme that is required for the virus to mature and form infectious viral particles. Approximately 6 million compounds were docked against the ZIKV protease, followed by interaction-based docking filters to find compounds that were predicted to dock well to the allosteric site. We then used machine learning models as filters (our suite of Bayesian models that predict mouse liver microsomal stability, lack of cytotoxicity, and solubility). We ultimately visually inspected the binding modes of the top 318 compounds, and we narrowed it down to 27 candidates. These candidates will be purchased and then assayed by our collaborators, to discern their potency at inhibiting the protease, as well as their efficacy in cell-based assays.

We also analyzed the docking results regarding the Chembridge database (~1 million compounds) against NS5 polymerase (RNA and NTP sites) and NS5 methyltransferase (active, SAM and GTP sites), as well as the NS3 helicase (ATP and RNA sites). We filtered the best ranked compounds through the developed ZIKV QSAR models and performed a medicinal chemistry inspection of the filtered compounds, selecting 33 compounds in total. The next steps will be to order these compounds and experimentally test them (Figure 1).

​

Upcoming and Recent Publications

We recently published a review paper entitled “Computational drug discovery for the Zika virus.” This paper was published in a special issue of the Brazilian Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences. In this paper, we summarize current computational drug discovery efforts and their application to the discovery of anti-ZIKV drugs. We also present successful examples of the use of computational approaches to ZIKV drug discovery, including our OpenZika project.

In November, we published a keynote review entitled “The A–Z of Zika drug discovery” in the journal Drug Discovery Today. This is a comprehensive review of the recent advances in ZIKV drug discovery efforts, highlighting drug repositioning and computationally guided compounds, including recently discovered viral and host cell inhibitors. Promising ZIKV molecular targets are also described and discussed, as well as targets belonging to the host cell, as new opportunities for ZIKV drug discovery. All this knowledge is not only crucial to advancing the fight against the Zika virus and other flaviviruses, but it will also help the scientific community prepare for the next emerging virus outbreak to which we will have to respond.

Dr. Ekins, Dr. Andrade, and Dr. Mottin, along with other researchers, recently had a review paper “High Throughput and Computational Repurposing for Neglected Diseases” accepted in the journal Pharmaceutical Research. This paper describes the many drug repurposing efforts that have been going on in different labs around the world to try to find treatments for many tropical diseases.

​

Past Publications and Outreach

New Collaborations

New Student Team Member

As mentioned above, Dr. Andrade has hired a new graduate student, Bruna Sousa, to work on the OpenZika project. She started working in Dr. Andrade’s lab in March 2018, and she is very enthusiastic about learning and collaborating on the project. She is a volunteer for the OpenZika project with an Android device, and has invited students and professors of the graduate program, during classes and through her personal social media, to participate in the project. She is joining in the OpenZika calls with World Community Grid.

​

Status of the Calculations

In total, we have submitted almost 6.8 billion docking jobs, which involved 427 different target sites. Our initial screens used an older library of 6 million commercially available compounds, and our current experiments utilize the new ZINC15 library of 30.2 million compounds. We have already received approximately 6.3 billion of these results on our server. (As a reminder, there is some lag time between when the calculations are performed on our volunteer’s machines and when we get the results, since all of the results per “package” of approximately 10,000 – 50,000 different docking jobs need to be returned to World Community Grid, re-organized, and then compressed before they are sent to our server.)

So far, the > 80,000 volunteers who have donated their spare computing power to OpenZika have given us > 63,023 CPU years’ worth of docking calculations, at a current average of 66.3 CPU years per day! Thank you all very much for your help!

Except for a few stragglers, we have received all of the results for our experiments that involve docking 6 million compounds versus NS1, NS3 helicase (both the RNA binding site and the ATP site), NS5 (both the RNA polymerase and the methyltransferase domains), NS2B/NS3 protease and capsid (binding pockets 1 and 2).

Thank you to all the volunteers who are donating their unused computing time to this project! We appreciate your help!

It is good to see a lot of work getting done and the scientist's doing their best to promote the work, for all to use!

All of the Story, HERE.
Bruna is a beautiful addition to the Zika project!!

 

[Arjai]

Planned Maintenance on Tuesday, January 8

Summary
We are updating the storage system on our servers on Tuesday, January 8, beginning at 15:00 UTC.

We will be applying an important storage system update to our servers on Tuesday, January 8, beginning at 15:00 UTC. We anticipate that the work will take approximately four hours.

During this time, volunteers will not be able to upload or download new work. No action is required by you, as your devices will automatically retry their connections after the maintenance work is completed.

We appreciate your patience and participation.

 

[hat]

That seems like it should affect almost nobody. Doesn't BOINC already queue up a larger buffer than that by default?

 

[phill]

Only if you leave it at default, I think it buffers about a day or two's work

 

[Arjai]

I cache 3.1 days of work. So, They (WCG servers) could have a big issue, and I would still have work.


Or, alternately, I could have an issue with my ISP, or the ISP might have an issue. Both scenarios I have lived through. I ran out of jobs, ONCE!! That taught me to cache jobs.

 

[phill]

I cache 3.1 days of work. So, They (WCG servers) could have a big issue, and I would still have work.


Or, alternately, I could have an issue with my ISP, or the ISP might have an issue. Both scenarios I have lived through. I ran out of jobs, ONCE!! That taught me to cache jobs.

I've stopped caching so many just in case I never get to finish them in time and they just get taken away anyways, but I'll add two days onto the ones I'm running now just in case But loving the thread for the updates, thank you!!

 

[Arjai]

Meet Your Fellow Volunteer Computing Enthusiasts at the BOINC Workshop 2019

19 Feb 2019

Summary
We're excited host this year's BOINC Workshop in Chicago, Illinois, USA. If you're reading this, you're part of the BOINC community and we'd like to meet you.

It's almost that time of year again...the 13th annual BOINC Workshop is happening from July 9 to July 12, and registration is now open. This year, the workshop is being hosted by World Community Grid in IBM's Chicago offices.

Attendees to the 2019 workshop are invited to give a 15-30 minute presentation about the work they are doing with BOINC.

All scientists, project administrators, developers, volunteers, and anyone with an interest in volunteer computing will be welcome to attend. Past BOINC Workshops have covered topics such as presentations on the science supported by BOINC projects, ideas for future development, how GDPR may affect the ways that BOINC projects handle data, and suggestions for simplifying volunteer registration. You can see all of the presentations from last year's workshop here, and listen to audio from the workshop here.

Registration is free. We'll update the BOINC Workshop 2019 page as more information becomes available, but in the meantime feel free to ask any question in the workshop forum thread.

See you in Chicago!

Entire post is HERE.

I am, sincerely, considering this as I have some Holiday pay to use!

 

[phill]

If only it was a little closer to me

 

[Arjai]

New Type of Work Unit and New Team Members for FightAIDS@Home - Phase 2

By: The FightAIDS@Home research team

28 Feb 2019

Summary
FightAIDS@Home - Phase 2 has released a new, more efficient type of work unit. They've also added four new members to their research team.

New Work Units
For the past year and a half, the research team at Temple University has worked closely with the World Community Grid software developers (particularly Keith Uplinger and Jonathan Armstrong) to create and implement a simulation scheme that more closely mimics the simulations run on non-grid computing resources. This new sampling protocol is called asynchronous replica exchange.

How Asynchronous Replica Exchange Works

Previous Process:
Multiple copies of a protein-ligand complex (the structure consisting of a drug candidate compound docked with a protein receptor) were sent out to many volunteers and are simulated with no interaction with one another. The collective information from all those simulations are combined during analysis at the very end.

New Process:
Asynchronous replica exchange drastically increases the efficiency of the computations. This means that, in addition to being more valuable in terms of analysis, the number of batches running simultaneously can be increased and each batch will have shorter total simulation times.

We first prototyped this new technique on our own BOINC-powered grid at Temple University. Over the past year and a half, the World Community Grid software developers have worked with us to test, refine, and now to implement the same technique on the World Community Grid platform. This effort is the largest replica exchange simulations (by two orders of magnitude) ever performed.

For more information about this work, see these two articles:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jcc.23996/abstract

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010465515002556

New Team Members​

We’re excited to welcome four new members of the Levy Group as research team members for the FightAIDS@Home project.

Bin Zhang
Associate Research Professor

Bin Zhang is an associate research professor from Ron Levy's Group at Temple University. He holds a Ph.D degree in physics from the University of Pittsburgh. Bin joined Dr. Levy's group in 2013. His research focuses on developing advanced sampling and reweighting(sp) algorithms in biophysics and computer simulations.

Di Cui
Assistant Research Professor

Dr. Di Cui is a computational chemist with an interest in biomolecular modeling. Currently, he is an assistant research professor in the Department of Chemistry, Center for Biophysics and Computational Biology, Temple University. His research has been focused on understanding the mechanisms and estimation the binding affinity of small-molecule ligands to protein active sites using molecular dynamic simulations. His current work involves the application of molecular modeling techniques to analyze the binding affinities to the target proteins, with the goal to design new ligand molecules that could serve as leads and optimized compounds for drug discovery.

Avik Biswas
Graduate Student

Avik Biswas is currently a Ph.D (Physics) student in the Ron Levy group at Temple University, Philadelphia. Prior to joining the Levy group in 2016, Avik completed his Integrated BS-MS from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (Bhopal, India) where his research involved using molecular dynamics and ab initio methods (Density Functional Theory) to understand the mechanics of rolling graphene. Currently, his research is focused on using Potts Hamiltonian models of protein evolutionary fitness to study the inter-relations between protein sequence, structure, and fitness, with a particular interest in the evolution of drug resistance in HIV.

Shima Arasteh
Graduate Student

Shima Arasteh is a Ph.D student from Ron Levy's group at Temple University. She holds a bachelor's degree in physics and a master's degree in biophysics from the University of Tehran. Before joining Dr. Levy's group in 2015, her research focused on the functions and stability of membrane ion channels. Currently, she is studying the conformational transitions of protein kinases, and developing advanced algorithms to measure the free energy changes of these transitions.

Thank you to everyone who is supporting FightAIDS@Home. We couldn’t do it without your donated computing power.

Sounds good to me!!

Edited, slightly. Full article, HERE.

 

[Arjai]

"We can feel the heartbeats of the crunch for science."

By: Jerome Doussy
CRUNCHERS SANS FRONTIERES

12 Mar 2019

Summary
Meet Jerome Doussy, a volunteer from France who shares his own words why he supports World Community Grid and scientific research.

My name is Jérôme Doussy. I'm French and I live near Bordeaux. I work in the industrial sector for the Mondelez International company. I'm 43 years old and a father of two lovable children. My hobbies include computers, science, astronomy, photography, and sports.

I started distributed computing with the SETI@Home project as an astronomy fan more than 10 years ago. I felt concerned with the fact that humanity is not alone in our universe, so helping scientists with SETI@Home and BOINC (the software that World Community Grid and other distributed computing projects are run on) was quite an obvious choice for me.

It was at this time that I met Thomas H.V. Dupont, who recruited me to his former team on the SETI@Home project, BRIGADE DU COSMOS (BDC). After a time, the BDC team was dissolved because we wanted to turn to distributed computing projects which address more tangible issues. So CRUNCHERS SANS FRONTIERES (CSF) was born--a dynamic team of dedicated people and serious crunchers.

We joined World Community Grid because it seemed to us to be a serious entity with great scientists, great staff behind the scenes, great scientific feedback, and a great community of crunchers. Besides, it deals with many of the serious diseases all around the world, such as AIDS, Zika, Ebola, and cancer. Overcoming these deadly diseases via distributed computing instills a new dynamic and a new hope. We can do something to help so let's go!

In CRUNCHERS SANS FRONTIERES, we can feel the heartbeats of the Crunch for Science. It's in our DNA. We are not a large team, but we are deeply concerned and aware of the importance of the projects we support. We are an international team, and we organize challenges such as THOR CHALLENGE or ATHENA TROPHY to help motivate World Community Grid crunchers to remain very active.

The CSF team is my engine and especially a second family. Each member has the same purpose and it make me feel important and keeps me motivated! I'm very proud to have a chance to help scientific research on disease with World Community Grid. It's a great opportunity for ordinary people to contribute to the building of a better world...it's priceless for sure!

I wholeheartedly agree with the highlighted text, quoted above.

Full Story, and pic, can be found HERE.

 

[AmioriK]

I wholeheartedly agree with the highlighted text, quoted above.

Yes, same. For me, WCG (and F@H) combines too of my passions; computer technology and microprocessors, and helping people. This is why I'm so heavily invested in it. I'm going to watch this thread, I didn't know it was here until I clicked on it this morning.

With all the negative and upsetting news in the world, this is a ray of light I sorely need. Thanks

 

[hat]

That was how I felt when I first started doing such projects. Especially before WCG was a thing (at least at TPU) and we were all running the single core command line FAH client, multiple instances of it if we had dual core or better processors. I almost felt like some kind of researcher myself, watching those FAH cores crunch away in those command prompt windows. Then the SMT core came along, and GPU folding, and WCG... and then I started collecting hardware to build multiple rigs. It's the reason I ever had a second computer to begin with (I later found other uses for it, but it was originally so I could fold and crunch more). It's also the reason that by this time next year I might be eyeballing some Ryzen hardware myself for my second computer (once my loan is paid off and I have more free money for things). Or maybe a used workstation. There's a lot of options.

But, in reality, all I'm doing is installing a program and sending results to someone else to mull over. But, without all of us making up the distributing computing project that is WCG, those researchers would have far less to work with. They turned to the masses, asking to borrow their unused computing power, for their research, relying on the good will of man... and here we are. Collectively, the Grid is also far more powerful than any supercomputer they could have rented.

 

[phill]

I do wonder how many researchers are sat there looking at all the data that we (TPU) and the rest of the teams submit.. I mean there's literally thousands, if not a million or so of results returned each day.. Compare this back to when I first started in 2007 with single core CPUs, my world how things have moved on. I can crunch what I did in 2007/2008 in a year in a day with the hardware I have working now. How scary is that??

 

[hat]

I remember crunching on a single core AM2 Sempron for a while... overclocked to 3GHz. It ran Battlefield 2 and Fallout 3 decently. Then I got my 7750BE.

I started FAH with a Athlon64 5200+ though, I believe. I upgraded to an OG Phenom x4, but I blew up my board trying to overclock it. Still wish I hadn't done that. That's how I wound up with the single core chip for a while...

 

[phill]

My first Crunching machine was an AMD XP CPU. I remember also crunching on a EPIA 533Mhz system as well that I used for a server back years ago.. Man that thing was very very slow... lol I believe I still have pictures of that too....

 

[Arjai]

I started on a Socket A Duron!, With the help of some TPU WCG-er's, I ran about 4 different CPU's until I found a mobile chip, a 2600m? That would clock at 1.1GHz stable, 24/7!

I burned the board out after a couple of years. I tried to revive it but, have been unable to find a working Socket A motherboard. LOL. I have bought a few duds, but they were inexpensive. Given a larger budget? I could possibly find a working board. I have also thought of having one of them repaired, but that is still money I can't spend. Hardly seems worth it, now. Maybe someday, when I have nothing better to do!