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Science at home with Distributed Volunteer Computing: BOINC - World Community Grid - etc

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keith
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Science at home with Distributed Volunteer Computing: BOINC - World Community Grid - etc

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Post by keith »

Anybody into using their computers at home to solve REAL science problems via Volunteer Computing (Wikipedia)

Ever heard of SETI? Search for Extraterrestrial Intellegence? The project has ended now (its data came from the now defunct Arecibo Radio Telescope), but many others are needing volunteer computers all the time.

BOINC is the major platform used by a wide range of computing problems today, from mapping the galaxy, to folding proteins, cancer research, covid research, etc, etc. You can download the BOINC client here

World Community Grid, originally developed by IBM to work on smallpox, is now a coordinator for many scientific projects. A list of some of the completed projects is at the Wikipedia page:


Here's some info on a recent project that has just released its paper and some interesting summary videos.

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Milkyway@Home: New N-Body Result!
We have measured the original shape and mass of the dwarf galaxy that was ripped apart to make the Orphan-Chenab Stream! The paper is out today: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3 ... 357/ac498a Eric Mendelsohn was the lead author on this study.

Professor Heidi Jo Newberg has made a ~14 min video explaining the topic here: , and a longer ~24 min video with more information here:

Thank you to all our volunteers for helping make this possible! We seriously appreciate the contributions that you all make to this project. Without you, we wouldn't have been able to locate dark matter in the Milky Way!
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Has everybody heard about the bird?
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John Thomas8
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Re: Science at home with Distributed Volunteer Computing: BOINC - World Community Grid - etc

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Post by John Thomas8 »

Back in 2001ish my manager was a SETI supporter, so we put the SETI program on all the desktop Sun machines and PCs and ran it off hours. That lasted about a year, until the manager retired and the new guy shut it down. Last I heard, the first manager retired to southern New Mexico and was handing out food and water to border crossers.
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