WCGrid News and Talking Points!!

[manofthem]

Database Upgrade: Saturday, February 28, 2015 at 03:00:00 UTC
24 Feb 2015

Word for Word:

Summary
Database upgrades will be performed Saturday, February 28th.

World Community Grid will be performing a database upgrade starting Saturday, February 28, 2015 at 03:00:00 UTC. The window for this maintenance activity is estimated to be 16 hours, although we anticipate the actual outage time will be less.

During this database upgrade, volunteer devices may not be able to fetch new research tasks or return completed work for a period of time. However the World Community Grid website will be available.

No action is required by the members, as the BOINC/World Community Grid software application will automatically reconnect to our servers once the upgrade is over.

Thank you again for your participation in World Community Grid!

So, Yea. Let's get those buffers pumped up an extra day. AND Be sure to Manually update Friday Night, or Day, if'n you prefer that!

Proof.

Wow, 16hrs! You're right bud, jump the buffer

 

[twilyth]

New article on WCG - https://sciencesprings.wordpress.co...g-the-worlds-worst-health-issues-in-it-world/

Like Dr. Saphire, he prefers the massive number of CPUs available via WCG over an in-house supercomputer. “We have very good computing resources here, but we’re not the only people who use the computing resources at Scripps. We can only get 300 CPUs at any given time, whereas on the World Community Grid we can get tens of thousands of CPUs to use at any given time. So it’s a major boost. We would never even try to do the scope of the kinds of dockings we do using just our local institutional resources,” he said.

The membership numbers it cites though are completely wrong. We don't have 700k members but less than half a million and of those, only 70k are active - with the numbers on a downward trend.

 

[DinaAngel]

I will help fold soon!

 

[twilyth]

I will help fold soon!

Protein folding is a different project although WCG has done some related projects in the past.

 

[krusha03]

I will help fold soon!

But it's a waste not to get those 12 threads crunching when idle

 

[DinaAngel]

why cant i seem to get my gpus to do the cancer project, it said it was the one who had it enabled. also whats optimal work strength?

 

[krusha03]

why cant i seem to get my gpus to do the cancer project, it said it was the one who had it enabled. also whats optimal work strength?

Afaik there arent any GPU projects only CPU

 

[manofthem]

why cant i seem to get my gpus to do the cancer project, it said it was the one who had it enabled. also whats optimal work strength?

Afaik there arent any GPU projects only CPU

@krusha03 is correct, there is no gpu work for WCG. The previous HCC gpu work ended around May '13, and as of yet there hasn't been any additional gpu enabled project.

The next best thing is to fire up F@H which takes full advantage of gpu. Drop by the F@H team thread if you're interested, simple setup.

 

[twilyth]

why cant i seem to get my gpus to do the cancer project, it said it was the one who had it enabled. also whats optimal work strength?

There's a chance that the Ebola project might have gpu work at some point. They have a dedicated computer science PhD working on their next phase. I think in many cases, people don't really have the coding knowledge or experience to put together something suited to high performance computing where you can take advantage of massive parallelization. But if OET can be set up that way, at least we know that they have someone on staff with the chops to do it.

 

[manofthem]

There's a chance that the Ebola project might have gpu work at some point. They have a dedicated computer science PhD working on their next phase. I think in many cases, people don't really have the coding knowledge or experience to put together something suited to high performance computing where you can take advantage of massive parallelization. But if OET can be set up that way, at least we know that they have someone on staff with the chops to do it.

That would be fantastic if so! let's hope he can do it, they decide to do it, and we get them!

 

[Arjai]

Top distributed computing projects still hard at work fighting the world's worst health issues
By Andy Patrizio
ITworld | March 9, 2015

This past fall saw the worst Ebola outbreak ever ravage western Africa, and while medical researchers are trying to find a drug to treat or prevent the disease, the process is long and complicated. That's because you don't just snap your fingers and produce a drug with a virus like Ebola.

Thanks to thousands of strangers, Ebola researchers are getting the help and computing power they need to shave off the time needed to find new drugs by a few years.

There is a wide variety of programs, and one of them is aimed at finding drugs to help stop Ebola. It's part of the World Community Grid (WCG), run by IBM and using software developed at the University of California at Berkeley.

In the case of Ebola, WCG has partnered with The Scripps Institute, a biomedical research group in La Jolla, Calif., to launch Outsmart Ebola Together. The project will target multiple hemorrhagic viruses in the Ebola family, according to Dr. Erica Saphire, the researcher heading the program at Scripps.

Dr. Art Olson, professor in a department of integrative computational and structural biology at Scripps, has used WCG for the FightAIDS@Home project since 2005, and before that with a now-defunct company called United Devices back in 2000 in one of the first distributed biomedical computing project.

Like Dr. Saphire, he prefers the massive number of CPUs available via WCG over an in-house supercomputer. "We have very good computing resources here, but we're not the only people who use the computing resources at Scripps. We can only get 300 CPUs at any given time, whereas on the World Community Grid we can get tens of thousands of CPUs to use at any given time.

A recently disclosed project from the Help Fight Childhood Cancer group at WCG found compounds to cure childhood neuroblastoma, a cancer of the nervous system. Done in conjunction with a group in Japan, they found 7 drug candidates with a 95% likelihood of curing the cancer.

So it could be that your idle PC may one day save your life.

Nice article about the success of WCG and the work of another, smaller, DC program.

Read it all, Here!

 

[Arjai]

Seven quadrillion comparisons later, Uncovering Genome Mysteries is just getting started

26 Feb 2015 ?March maybe?

Summary
The Uncovering Genome Mysteries research team has started analyzing results from their massive ongoing project, which is comparing proteins between diverse organisms from around the world. Better understanding of similarities between proteomes should help scientists develop sustainable technologies, renewable materials, productive crops, and new treatments for stubborn diseases.

The project expects to examine more than 200 million proteins, the majority of which were generated in environmental and ecological studies ranging from bacteria in marine ecosystems in Australia, to Amazon River samples from Brazil.

Of the expected 20 quadrillion (20,000,000,000,000,000) comparisons in the project, about 36% have been completed thus far, equivalent to almost 8,000 CPU-years of computation.

Incredibly AWESOME, no?

This project involves cooperation between World Community Grid; the laboratory of Dr. Torsten Thomas and his team in the School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences & Centre for Marine Bio-Innovation at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; and the laboratory for Functional Genomics and Bioinformatics of Dr. Wim Degrave and his team at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation – Fiocruz, in Brazil.

The data resulting from those calculations are starting to be processed at Fiocruz and the University of New South Wales, and will later be presented in a database that will allow researchers to study the relationships between the proteins of all living things, to help develop a much better understanding of organisms in their (biodiverse) environment.

For example, these might function as insecticides, antibiotics or enzymes that can degrade and eliminate waste or industrial pollutants such as oil or organic chemicals. Enzymes can aid in the synthesis and production of “green chemicals” and biotransformation systems, but also in the production of renewable energy such as bio-alcohols, or in more sophisticated systems through synthetic biology, where the engineering of microorganisms can optimize the production of biopharmaceuticals, green plastics and biofuels.

Yes, I like this.

We deeply thank the World Community Grid volunteers who are contributing to this massive effort.

I think I speak for all of us here at TPU, in Thanks to you all for doing such a daunting task that will do nothing more than make this a better place to live, and to live healthy.

Read ALL about it, Here!

 

[Arjai]

Top distributed computing projects still hard at work fighting the world's worst health issues

By Andy Patrizio
ITworld|March 9, 2015

This past fall saw the worst Ebola outbreak ever ravage western Africa, and while medical researchers are trying to find a drug to treat or prevent the disease, the process is long and complicated. That's because you don't just snap your fingers and produce a drug with a virus like Ebola.

Thanks to thousands of strangers, Ebola researchers are getting the help and computing power they need to shave off the time needed to find new drugs by a few years.

There is a wide variety of programs, and one of them is aimed at finding drugs to help stop Ebola. It's part of the World Community Grid (WCG), run by IBM and using software developed at the University of California at Berkeley.

The Ebola hunt
In the case of Ebola, WCG has partnered with The Scripps Institute, a biomedical research group in La Jolla, Calif., to launch Outsmart Ebola Together. The project will target multiple hemorrhagic viruses in the Ebola family, according to Dr. Erica Saphire, the researcher heading the program at Scripps.

Dr. Saphire said the FightAIDS@Home group at Scripps often gets done in a few months what would have taken 10 years otherwise and wants to put the three million devices of WCG to work. "With this massive computational power, we're asking what can we understand that we've never understood before," she said. "It's the most fundamentally important thing my lab has ever done. It's also the biggest."

Scripps is a large, well-funded institute and could easily afford supercomputers, but Dr. Saphire said WCG is a better option. "It turns out that having hundreds of thousands of computers in parallel accelerates things more than having a supercomputer here," she said.

Success stories
Dr. Art Olson, professor in a department of integrative computational and structural biology at Scripps, has used WCG for the FightAIDS@Home project since 2005, and before that with a now-defunct company called United Devices back in 2000 in one of the first distributed biomedical computing project.

Like Dr. Saphire, he prefers the massive number of CPUs available via WCG over an in-house supercomputer. "We have very good computing resources here, but we're not the only people who use the computing resources at Scripps. We can only get 300 CPUs at any given time, whereas on the World Community Grid we can get tens of thousands of CPUs to use at any given time. So it's a major boost. We would never even try to do the scope of the kinds of dockings we do using just our local institutional resources," he said.

There are other WCG successes besides Scripps. Dr. Berstis said one success story was simulations of carbon nanotubes. Water flows through the tubes 10,000 times more efficiently than thought, so there are now experiments to find less expensive methods of filtering or desalinating water than using the very expensive reverse osmosis filters.

Remember this? All the science talk from these guys made my head spin!!

A recently disclosed project from the Help Fight Childhood Cancer group at WCG found compounds to cure childhood neuroblastoma, a cancer of the nervous system. Done in conjunction with a group in Japan, they found 7 drug candidates with a 95% likelihood of curing the cancer.

Absolutely, an Incredible Project Success!!

Finally, there was a cancer project that looked at images of biopsies with machine optical scanning. Eventually an algorithm was developed that helped analyze those images to determine if cancer cells are present. "They are as good as humans now so it will help identify if there is cancer present or not much faster," said Dr. Berstis.

Love, LOVE, it!!

...CDx needed a cheap system that can process 590GB of image data generated per pathology slide, and patients can have multiple slides, in less than four minutes....

Employees leave their computers on when they go home at night. The client PCs tell the servers their computing capabilities and the servers decide which computers get what kinds of workloads. Faster computers get the higher priority in doing the next task, said Robert Tjon, vice president of engineering and developer of the grid.

"One hundred percent utilization of the computer resources will keep the cost of the overall grid down in terms of space, heat, power, and manpower to keep the system up. We also like the fact that Intel invests billions to make the computer cheaper and faster and we only have to pay the price of a regular, popular consumer item," he said.

So it could be that your idle PC may one day save your life.

A lot of US, already know this stuff. However, it is nice to see more, and more, news sites pick this up. Spreadin' the WORD!!
Amen!!


The WHOLE of it, Aqui!




P.S. I thought this was a little familiar! I think I quoted the post better this time, though!

 

[krusha03]

I love when i read there is an actual progress by the work being done by our PCs

 

[Arjai]

Not sure if many of you are aware of the Research Page on WCG.

It shows the amount of progress on each active Project.

It can be found, Here!

 

[manofthem]

Not sure if many of you are aware of the Research Page on WCG.

It shows the amount of progress on each active Project.

It can be found, Here!

Thanks for the link, didn't know about that. Seems I should get back in on some CEP2 live before it closes out. It looks like I have some time but I only have like 180 days on that project, not much at all.

 

[Peter1986C]

Not sure if many of you are aware of the Research Page on WCG.

It shows the amount of progress on each active Project.

It can be found, Here!

I know about it, but thanked you because it is good that you brought it up.

 

[Arjai]

This has been floating around the "Notices" tabs on my machines. Thought to myself, "Self, why not add a post to the Talking Points?"

So, here we are!

BOINC released a new version of it's Manager. 7.4.42.

The Notes....

Changes in 7.4.42

• Update localizations
• Screensaver fix for when the client is suspended
• When using a proxy, fallback to HTTP 1.0 if the proxy returns a 417 status code.
• Fixed Windows 10 detection (kernel version change)

How's about that?!?!



Get it here, while it's still got the fresh BOINC smell to it!!
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Release_Notes

 

[Arjai]

The past and the potential of World Community Grid: A Q&A with senior team

members.

14 Apr 2015

Summary
World Community Grid senior scientist Viktors Berstis and technical lead Keith Uplinger participated in a Question & Answer session with one of the winners of the Decade of Discovery recruitment competition held last November.

Long and Interesting talk, HERE

 

[twilyth]

Oh wow - they talked to one user - woo-hoo.

Now maybe if they conducted another survey with feedback from the community as to what should actually go into the survey, I might be impressed. But if they think that stunts like this are going to make any difference in terms of people leaving, my guess is that they're going to be severely disappointed.

 

[Arjai]

Um, OK. So, maybe that was not the most interesting interview. However, I do kind of like the outside the box thinking process. I would like to leave it to the scientist's to invent the Ideas, rather than a couple of WCG cronies. Either way, it is something WCG has not done before. That I know of, in my short WCG life. That said, perhaps they can improve upon it, now that the first one is under their belt.

As far as numbers...WCG has yet to become sexy.

WCG should set up some sexy business cards, in multiple languages, to sell on their site. We, the unsexy Crunchers could drop them off with our kids, at the coffee shops or even drop them in the halls of the Mall you do your morning walks in.

Kids today, or rather, in my little world, seem to have a disconnect with everything outside of their phone. Or, incessant complaining about that ugly girl at school.

I'm no marketing major but, somebody, somewhere, knows what kids today will think is sexy. iPhone's figured it out, get somebody to reach out to this generation, that is not a parental figure, and get them on board!

Rant over.

 

[Heaven7]

We, the unsexy Crunchers

Yup, that's us! And proud of it, too. No need for sexy business cards (let me see one), but to get more people to join the WCG. Telling those kids their own phone will make more points crunching than their friend's could probably heat up the place... just my 2 cents.

 

[twilyth]

There are a lot of reasons why participation in WCG is falling. People are spending more time on their phones, which are really pretty power computers but WCG hasn't done much to promote the android app - at least not that I'm aware of. But the main problem is that WCG has done nothing to cultivate a community. Look at a site like Gaia online if you want to see how stimulate involvement. WCG could do similar things like giving WCG "gold" to people who participate and then letting them use that to buy virtual goods on the site. It would cost nothing except the development costs.

But IBM isn't willing to promote WCG and even less willing to spend any more money on it than they have to. A lot of that has to do with the company itself not doing well. Maybe if their bets on Watson and cloud services pays off they'll be more willing to throw some cash at WCG, but unless and until they do something, the number of active members is going to continue to decline.

 

[Peter1986C]

- Computer knowledge needed.
- Juice is pricey for many folks.
- Science, but also DC is above the minds of the common folk.
- Too many tinfoilers say pills are just moneymakers.
- Too many of us are (afraid to be) called "that weirdo with his computer"

 

[Arjai]

Turning virtual results into real-world treatments for schistosoma

22 Apr 2015

Summary

The research team has combed through the grid computing results of Say No to Schistosoma, using several additional analytical techniques to help them select promising compounds. The three most promising substances are undergoing additional testing with the hope of identifying the most effective potential treatments for schistosomiasis.

Thanks to World Community Grid volunteers who contributed to Say No to Schistosoma, we have selected compounds from the grid-based screening for further testing. We collaborated with various laboratories to perform further computer analysis of 24 compounds using several software tools.

Quantitative Structure-activity relationship (QSAR) models were used to further evaluate the results. For more about QSAR, see here and here.

Spoiler

We wish to thank and acknowledge the help of World Community Grid volunteers and IBM for making this project possible. We are grateful that we can continue our efforts to find new treatments for schistosomiasis.