The SUNY Oswego

Team on

BOINC

"BOINC" is a funny name for a system that allows you to help make the world a little better place by donating the unused processor capacity of your personal computer to very large scale science projects, including medical research projects. Most people don't know it, but most of the time your computer is on well over 90% of its capacity goes unused, even when you are working at your machine. When you run "BOINC", that computer capacity is combined with capacity from other personal computers (over half a million of them right now) to create a huge distributed supercomputer. BOINC is currently running on computers in over 200 countries around the world. SUNY Oswego students, faculty, and staff who join the SUNY Oswego Team can help demonstrate that SUNY Oswego is a school that cares. Join a "BOINC" project today.

The SUNY Oswego BOINC team is currently supporting the following projects:

Project Description Directions

Einstein@Home

Find Neutron Stars and help test Physics predictions.

Einstein@Home searches for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors. Pulsars are super-dense stars that aren't observable in the visual wavelengths in which we normally observe stars. A neutron star with the same mass as our sun would be about the same size as Syracuse (with a radius of about 6 miles). This project attempts to find and study these neutron stars and, in the process, get a better understanding of the dynamics of super-dense matter. Here's a pointer to a recent writeup of this project by the project team that includes some results from Einstein@Home. Directions for joining Einstein@Home

Predictor@Home

Help predict protein structure.

"The human body makes at least 50,000 different proteins, and possibly twice that many.". Most or all of those proteins are created in our cells by our DNA. The ability of our body to create the right proteins at the right time is fundamental to our normal development as a person. When we don't produce the right protein at the right time, the result may be a protein-related disease. Studies show that sickle-cell anemia, for instance, involves genes that create a slightly different protein that most of us produce. The principle goal of Predictor@homeis to address critical biomedical questions of protein-related diseases by attempting to predict protein structure from protein sequence. Participants in this project test and evaluate new algorithms and methods of protein structure prediction. While the project is not specific about the protein-related diseases it is addressing, diseases that are currently thought to be protein related are Alzheimer’s, prion-based diseases (Mad-Cow disease), and some cancers.

Directions for joining Predictor@Home

Rosetta@Home

Help find cures for human diseases.

Protein-folding is currently thought to be one of the most difficult problems in biology, as it has been for over sixty years. Rosetta@home uses the brute force computational capabilities of hundreds of thousands of personal comptuers to determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins in research that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases. The focus of Rosetta@home is finding proteins that can cure other diseases, including protein-related diseases. By running the Rosetta program on your computer, you are helping efforts at fighting diseases such as HIV, Malaria, Cancer, and Alzheimer's. Directions for joining Rosetta@Home

Seti@Home

Help find E.T.

The original large scale distributed computer project, and still the largest BOINC project. SETI (the 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. Radio telescope signals consist primarily of noise (from celestial sources and the receiver's electronics) and man-made signals such as TV stations, radar, and satellites. Modern radio SETI projects analyze the data digitally. More computing power enables searches to cover greater frequency ranges with more sensitivity. Radio SETI, therefore, has an insatiable appetite for computing power. Directions for joining Seti@Home

Climate Prediction

Help test for Global Warming and improve long term weather forecasting.

An attempt to improve long term weather forecasting by doing large numbers of comprehensive weather models. Much of this work involves "modeling" the past to see find a combination of predictors that can correctly predict weather that has already happened. Climate change, and our response to it, are issues of global importance, affecting food production, water resources, ecosystems, energy demand, insurance costs and much else. There is a broad scientific consensus that the Earth will probably warm over the coming century; climateprediction.net should, for the first time, tell us what is most likely to happen.

climateprediction.net is the most computationally intense BOINC project. A downloaded unit of work for most BOINC projects will complete in just few hours. A downloaded unit of work in Climate Prediction will run on your computer for a half a year or more before its results will be known. Don't join this effort unless you have a fast machine that can run more or less continuously for most of the year.

Directions for joining Climate Prediction.

Hope to see you there.