Join the new world

(Česká verze)

I apologize I write about something different than about eRepublik, but I think this is really important.
By the way, if you want to correct my English (or translate it to other language), you can... But you know this. 🙂

Christmas are over and somebody is happy with their gifts and with that fact they can be with their family.. But we can't forget to our health - and because of that I ask for your help. Someone hasn't enough luck to be healthy as us. People die every day from diseases that doctors can't cure.
Why do I write this? Because we can do something with that. We can fight against that and we can save human lives. You say we can't? You say we, normal people, shouldn't do nothing with that?
You are wrong. We all can prevent these diseases - that all only with our running computer. You maybe know where I am going: distributed computing.



What is it?
It is counting. For example it can search spatial arrangement of complex protein molecules.
But what does mean word distributed? It means thousands and millions of computers in the whole world are involved in this computing - in our homes.
Most of scientists haven't money for supercomputers - for hiring too. Because of that they invented distributed computing. There can anyone join who would help science. And it pays off - these computers have huge performance, scientists save billions and people help science.

So my computer will only count? I'll can't do anything!
You shouldn't worry at all, you can control these calculations. You will not count all alone, everything will split up fairly to computers which are connected to this project.
To your computer will download only small amount of data - only several megabytes. Then your computer will count these tasks. It lasts mostly few hours, but there are exceptions - it can last hundreds hours until these tasks are computed.. Don't worry - you can compute when you want, you don't need to have computer turned on all time. And if you will have it turned on and you will browse in eRepublik or you will do something different, why shouldn't you engage? 🙂


main window of BOINC application (in Czech language)

There is BOINC written in image. What does it mean?
It means Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. BOINC is an application which take care of the calculations. You can choose from various projects - but this is in next question.
You can download this application on this site: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/.

In which projects can I participate?
I have mentioned in the top that you can help for example projects which deal with diseases and overall with biology. I will not name all projects, you can find them on this page.
You can research proteins, fight against malaria and so on.
I will choose some other projects. So in short: space exploration (most famous project at all SETI@home), research data from the LHC (the Large Hadron Collider), climate prediction, solving various mathematical mysteries, also rendering graphics, next for example chess games or cracking encrypted passwords. 🙂
As you can see, there are a lot of choices. I think everyone can choose...


graphical representation of a part of project World Community Grid - project Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy

Is there anything else interesting?
Yes, you receive credits for done tasks. With that is BOINC better - everyone is competitive. And don't say you aren't. 😉
You can add yourself to teams, which compete between them who has most credits. They organize various tournaments - time limited and only in one project. Who wins will get respect from others - and this is amazing. 🙂
Then you can look to BOINCstats statistics or to other statistics. Those who likes graphs and numbers will save this page to bookmarks.

Czech Republic has its own team - you can find informations about it, about projects and get some help on site of the Czech National Team.

So how did you decide? Will you help science or will you waste your computer power? I hope you choose for first variant.