Comments on: Distribute compute

By: Paradigm Shift@Home

Paradigm Shift@Home — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 23:44:30 +0000

[...] For more details on distributed computing and some of my thoughts on how the scientific community can better adopt these, check out the post at http://blog.benchside.com/2008/12/distribute-compute/ [...]

By: Head up in the Clouds at Bench Press

Head up in the Clouds at Bench Press — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:00:38 +0000

[...] mentioned before the power of Cloud Computing as a means of expanding the computational power in the hands of researchers and scientists (by [...]

By: Playing the crowd at Bench Press

Playing the crowd at Bench Press — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 12:09:31 +0000

[...] written before about the ability of scientists to use distributed computing to pool the computing power of millions of users over the internet to solve sophisticated [...]

By: Spark05

Spark05 — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 01:41:24 +0000

From my knowledge BOINC is in discussion of how to accommodate future additions of support of other processing types and my guess is they would be supporting AMD(ATI) GPU's and standards at the request or interest of scientists using/wanting to use BOINC and/or as they get more programmers contributing.

They are always looking for more people to help code in new features, enhancements, and testing/debugging. See here for development projects: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/DevProjects

By: Brandon Sos

Brandon Sos — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 05:04:15 +0000

Don't remember how I stumbled on this blog, but that's pretty interesting. I recently started learning visualization techniques for gene expression data/gene networks/pathways etc, and was thinking o sweet! giant gene network! Though I realized these examples need a lot more computational power after reading the article. I remember in 03... or 04 using a distributing computing method by SETI. It was a screen saver that utilized CPU power when the screen saver went on. I uninstalled it though, seemed to slow down my comp to much after running a bit. Other then that I've seen a distributed computing program for brute force recovery of passwords haha

If your curious here's a couple good progs for network visualization.
http://cytoscape.org/
http://www.ingenuity.com/

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:58:53 +0000

Jonathan, thank you for commenting. That is very interesting and a good resource to share. And I was not aware that BOINC had just begun support of CUDA. Will they be extending this to cover ATI's CTM/Brook/OpenCL (whatever standard it is they're using these days?) standard soon?

By: Jonathan Brier

Jonathan Brier — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 01:28:34 +0000

I would like to comment on BOINC portion. For the average person to not feel daunted by the process and make it as easy as checking your email I would recommend GridRepublic (www.gridrepublic.org). GridRepublic is a nonprofit working in collaboration with BOINC and is known as an account manager. They make using BOINC very simple by only having one log in to control all the projects you contribute to and help you find more projects and allow you to manage one to an unlimited amount of computer you own from a single website.

Also as of December 17, 2008 BOINC has added GPU computing for CUDA enabled graphic cards.

By: Ben

Ben — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:49:39 +0000

That's a pretty awesome idea actually…

By: Lena

Lena — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:45:08 +0000

Yup. They're primarily running / displaying actual simulations. But there at least used to be a tradition of Friday evening gaming on them as well

By: AnthonyPhan

AnthonyPhan — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 19:10:05 +0000

If only we could harness the power of people utilizing social networking sites like Facebook/Myspace.