World Community Grid Agent

I've found a new cancer fighting software you can run on your computer called World Community Grid Agent which is a completely free thing and is really 3 projects in one piece of software: Help Defeat Cancer Project, Human Proteome Folding - Phase 2 Project, FightAIDS@Home Project. I was curious if Major Geeks was interested in creating a team and joining up.

 

I just found something even more interesting. While looking around for other donation programs to use so I can help I came across a free program called BOINC which stands for: Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing is basically a file sharing program type deal for distributed computing which basically allows you to run and join multiple projects that currently has 31 active projects. For some reason it doesn't seem to have Folding@Home but that one is never easily forgotten (i still run that too) =o).

 

We did have a BOINC team, but the software was buggy and interest here quickly faded.

The Grid one looks interesting, but I'd be interested in who exactly is doing the research. The problem with third party DC programs is that you don't really know who's benefiting from it. Since Folding@Home is run directly from Stanford, you can be pretty certain that all the world is going towards their project - all of the work is open so you can track what each different project is doing.

Taking an example of Neo - another third party DCing platform - for a while they were donating time to worthwhile causes to do with medical research, but then the authors decided that now they had an extensive network to play with they were going to start working on another project - namely breaking the XBox's encryption to play copied games. While I don't personally disagree with breaking the encryption, it's something else entirely to hijack thousands of computers which were just a day ago doing medical research.

Although that's an extreme case, that's why you need to be very careful with third party platforms. BOINC is an academic project - which gives it a bit more weight and credit than the WCG which is run by a private organisation.

If I find out who will be using the platform then I might be more inclined to organise something myself - of course anyone else is perfectly welcome to start their own team if they wish.

Even though I'm not around as much as I was, I get emailed every time someone posts here or PMs me - this forum is not dead!

 

the WCG forum members, and the techs, are very nice and responsive.

i used to do genome-at-home til they stopped that one, and WCG is a good place to be. it is non-profit. right now the projects are cancer, AIDS and human proteome structures.

they use both boinc and the UD agent, and they support different operating systems too.

 

Yup, WCG is a step in the right direction after 2 years running UD with it's lack of suport for new hardware and various OSes.

Note though, that you need 750mb+ ram to run the cancer work.