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| Top Cat Computing BOINC Team |
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By SteveT on Saturday, April 17, 2010 :: Last Updated: Saturday, April 17, 2010
1072 Views :: 0 Comments ::  :: Knowledgebase |
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What is BOINC?
The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is a non-commercial middleware system for volunteer and grid computing. It was originally developed to support the SETI@home project before it became useful as a platform for other distributed applications in areas as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics. The intent of BOINC is to make it possible for researchers to tap into the enormous processing power of personal computers around the world.
BOINC has been developed by a team based at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley led by David Anderson, who also leads SETI@home. As a "quasi-supercomputing" platform, BOINC has over 565,000 active computers (hosts) worldwide processing on average 1.2 PFLOPS as of July 27, 2008. BOINC is funded by the National Science Foundation through awards SCI/0221529, SCI/0438443 and SCI/0721124. The framework is supported by various operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and various Unix-like systems including Linux and FreeBSD. BOINC is free software which is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License.
Top Cat Computing actively participates in BOINC. Our members participate in the following projects:
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Seti@home
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Home:U.C. Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory
Area: Astrophysics, astrobiology
Goal: SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a scientific area whose goal is to detect intelligent life outside Earth. One approach, known as radio SETI, uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. Such signals are not known to occur naturally, so a detection would provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology.
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Einstein@home
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Home: Univ. of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, Albert Einstein Institute
Area: Astrophysics
Goal: Search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors. Einstein@Home is a World Year of Physics 2005 project supported by the American Physical Society (APS) and by a number of international organizations.
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MilkyWay@home
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Home: Computer Science Department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Area: Astronomy
Goal: Research in modeling and determining the evolution of the Milkyway galaxy
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Orbit@home
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Home: Planetary Science Institute
Area: Astronomy/Physics
Goal: Study Solar System dynamics, at first focusing on Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) research specifically NEA seaarch strategies and NEA impact hazard monitoring.
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For a complete list of projects please visit http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Project_list. We invite you to join the Top Cat Computing BOINC Team! We would like to point out that our overall ranking for each team is relatively high, considering the small number of team members in each project.
We have teams in the following projects although currently there are no active members in these teams:
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Artificial Intelligence System
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Home: Intelligence Realm Inc.
Area: Reverse Engineering the Brain :: Massive Biophysical Neural Networks :: Scientific Data Visualization
Goal: Automated Research
This distributed computing project is part of a larger project that is reverse engineering the brain in order to build a large scale artificial intelligence system. The first of its kind. Because we are a very small company that is tackling an enormous challenge, we are asking the public at large to get involved by donating computer time. In order to be able to support and accelerate its development we will also pursue an alternative path, through commercialization.
Benefits To The Society: Exceptional
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BCL@Home
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Home: Vanderbilt University
Area: Biology
Goal: Drug Discovery through Computational Structural Biology and Chemistry using the BioChemistry Library (BCL).
Research in our laboratory seeks to fuse computational and experimental efforts to investigate proteins, the fundamental molecules of biology, and their interactions with small molecule substrates, therapeutics, or probes. We develop computational methods with three major ambitions in mind: 1) to enable protein structure elucidation of membrane proteins the primary target of most therapeutics and large macromolecular complexes such as viruses; 2) design proteins with novel structure and/or function to explore novel approaches to protein therapeutics and deepen our understanding of protein folding pathways, and 3) understand the relation between chemical structure and biological activity quantitatively in order to design more efficient and more specific drugs. Crucial for our success is the experimental validation of our computational approaches which we pursue in our laboratory or in collaboration with other scientists.
Current research focuses on entirely new approaches to a) drug and probe development for neurodegenerative disorders and diseases including Schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson’s, b) understanding the structural determinants of antidepressant binding to neurotransmitter transporters, c) cardiac arrhythmia as caused by the complex interplay of potassium channel regulation and drug interactions, d) multidrug resistance in cancer and bacterial cells related to multidrug transporter proteins, and
e) structural basis of viral infections and antibody activity.
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Magnetism@home
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Home: Donetsk Institute for Physics and Technology
Goal: Magnetism@home is a research project that uses Internet-connected computers to explore the equlibrium, metastable and transient magnetization patterns (first and foremost in nano-scale magnetic elements and their arrays, but later other systems may be considered).
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MindModeling@Home (Beta)
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Home: Cognitive Engineering Research Institute in Mesa, AZ
Goal: MindModeling@Home (Beta) is a research project that uses volunteer computing for the advancement of cognitive science. The research focuses on utilizing computational cognitive process modeling to better understand the human mind. We need your help to improve on the scientific foundations that explain the mechanisms and processes that enable and moderate human performance and learning. Please join us in our efforts! MindModeling@home is not for profit.
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WEP-M+2 Project
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Home: M+2 Group, London UK
Goal:WEP-M+2 (wanless2) is a research project that uses Internet-connected computers to do research in number theory.
WEP-M+2 is based at London, UK, and is currently investigating factorization of Mersenneplustwo numbers.
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Virtual Prairie
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Home: University of Houston
Goal: Socio-environmental framework and main goals
Environmental problems are increasingly growing and need to take into account human activity and preservation of the environment (see for instance the European Common Agricultural Policy in 2005, the French Grenelle of Environment in 2007) leading to the concept of sustainable development (conference of Rio, 1992). Natural ecosystems have been considered for a long time as supports for primary production for agricultural needs. Research was therefore focused on the evaluation of prairie productivity and the effect of management on the agronomical values of the prairies. The identification of other roles of prairies in ecosystems functioning has been detected while prairies were degraded to be converted into croplands especially after 1950 (through erosion, eutrophication, and biodiversity loss) (Vitousek et al., 1994).
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UH Second Computing
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Home: Department of Computer Science in University of Houston
Goal: Second Computing is a research project that uses Internet-connected computers to do research in different areas of computational science. You can participate by downloading and running a free program on your computer.
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POEM@HOME
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Home: Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe
Area: Biomolecular Structure Prediction
Goal: Proteins are the nanoscale machinery of all the known cellular life. Amazingly, these large biomolecules with up to 100,000 atoms fold into unique three-dimensional shapes in which they function.
These functions include all cellular chemistry (metabolism), energy conversion (photosynthesis) and transport (oxygen transport), signal processing in the brain (neurons), immune response and many others, often with an efficiency unmatched by any man-made process. Protein malfunction is often related to diseases and thousands disease-related proteins have been identified to date, many with still unknown structure.
To understand, control or even design proteins we need to study protein structure, which is experimentally much harder to obtain than the information about the chemical composition (sequence) of a specific protein.
By joining this project you will contribute to a computational approach to predict the biologically active structure of proteins
understand the signal-processing mechanisms when the proteins interact with one another understand diseases related to protein malfunction or aggregation develop new drugs on the basis of the three-dimensions structure of biologically important proteins.
POEM@HOME implements a novel approach to understand these aspects of protein structure, which lends itself very well to worldwide distributed computing. The scientific approach behind POEM@HOME is a computational realization of the thermodynamic hypothesis that won C. B. Anfinsen the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1972.
So please help us, by joining POEM@HOME, solve the scientific mysteries described above and decipher the biological information encoded in proteins of unknown structure.
POEM@HOME is a purely academic, non-profit project to improve our understanding of biomolecular structure and function. All substantial result of POEM@HOME will be published in international peer reviewed journals with proper credit to the POEM@HOME volunteers.
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malariacontrol.net
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Home: AFRICA@home is currently a partnership comprising the Swiss Tropical Institute (STI), the University of Geneva (Département d'informatique), the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the non-governmental organisations International Conference Volunteers (ICV) and Informaticiens sans Frontières (ISF). The partnership has received a grant from the foundation Geneva International Academic Network (GIAN) to start the AFRICA@home project.
Goal: The malariacontrol.net project is an application that makes use of network computing for stochastic modelling of the clinical epidemiology and natural history of Plasmodium falciparum malaria.
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Hydrogen@Home
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Goal: To enhance clean energy technology by improving hydrogen production and storage.
Hydrogen@Home is a research project that uses Internet-connected computers to do research in Hydrogen Production. Our project is in a conceptual developement phase called "Alpha" Phase, you can participate by downloading and running a free program on your computer.
Hydrogen@Home is an emerging BOINC project in need of volunteers. Hydrogen@Home is not affiliated with any research Institute or University.
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