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[Protactinium]

Alrighty. So, just like how Wii Fit finally made me start consistently exercising, a computer game has made me start giving humanitarian charity.

Fine, that's not entirely fair, I used to run Folding@Home, but my mother told me to stop running it because the computer fan was very loud and it seemed to slow my computer's responsiveness down.

Hold on, I ruined my lead into it. Let me start again:

World Community Grid

World Community Grid is in its most basic explanation a method of providing scientists access to a supercomputer to do their work. The way it works is that in order to model something accurately, like for instance a protein, the calculations involved in making that are huge and would take an ordinary computer a very long time. If you can split up the equation into a lot of small tiny calculations, you can send those to a bunch of normal computers, they'll all independently do different parts of the equation simultaneously, and return the results to the scientist's end.

If you download the BOINC client for World Community Grid, you can have your computer securely donate unused and otherwise-wasted computing cycles to working on projects like curing AIDS, muscular dystrophy, cancer, etcetera. WCG requires that you set up an account, so that your account can then join a team. These teams earn points for total run time and amount of results returned, and then they rank against each other to encourage competition. People set up challenges and so teams try to amp up donation in order to win by running their computers on longer and so on.

I got into participating a little over a month ago by a browser-based text RPG I play, called Improbable Island. In it, if we set up a WCG account and link it to our in-game account and join our WCG account to the Improbable Island WCG Team, we receive an in-game reward currency (which currently does nothing yet, but the anticipation is enough for us ). So, while I'm not strong enough to get around to contributing to science without getting some sort of game reward, perhaps you guys have a stronger willpower, and can make your own Dwarf Fortress Distributing Computing team for the grid.

If you're not totally clear on what's going on with it, the short FAQ from Improbable Island might help:

What? I can cure AIDS and cancer?

That's right! By donating your unused CPU cycles to boffins who need serious computing power, you can actually help make the world a better place. Come on, you're playing a text-based game, it's not like you're using much of your computer's resources anyway.

...what?

Let me explain. When a scientist wants to do something that involves an awful lot of computing power, he can go and book time on the sort of supercomputer that has to be cooled by liquid nitrogen and costs a couple of grand per hour to rent, or he can try to do the computation on his own computer and wait ten years. OR. Or. He can use a grid. Grid computing is where you've got a bunch of normal, everyday computers all connected together, working on the same problem and sending their answers back.

...what?

Scientists and researches want to use YOUR computer to fight AIDS, cancer, and world hunger! You download a little widget, and any unused CPU cycles go towards doing Wonderful Things!

...oh. Won't that slow down my machine? And it feels... icky, you know? I don't want strangers fiddling with my computer.

No, it won't slow down your machine. Not appreciably, anyway - the program only runs when you're not using your computer, kinda like a screensaver. I certainly didn't see any difference in the day-to-day performance of my computer. And there are no actual people involved with what your computer's doing - just a list of calculations to perform and send back to the scientists.

Okay, so what are they doing with my processor and memory?

Well, there's a bunch of things - the master list is here, and that shows you all the research that your computer can do while you're not using it. You can pick and choose between projects if you want.

So what's in it for me?

You get to contribute to humanitarian projects without having to open your wallet, get off your arse, or inconvenience yourself for more than about ten minutes. Every time a charity mugger tries to sign you up for a direct debit, you can say "Sorry, I'm already contributing to humanitarian research," and stroll on. You get to cure AIDS while in the pub, and address world hunger while puking in the toilet later on. You get to do something useful with your computer while you're not using it (and don't give me that "Oh, I always turn mine off to reduce my carbon footprint" bollocks, I know you've left your computer turned on and wasting electricity for ten minutes while you nip out for a ciggy or make a cup of tea, like I do every single day), instead of having it just sit there being useless.

If anyone else on these forums already contributes to it without being on a team, or if anyone gets it right away and understands what's going on, I highly encourage you to make the Dwarf Fortress team so that everyone here can do good and feel good about it! 

PS: I did a normal forum search for "World Community Grid" and didn't seem to get any relevant results about this project, so sorry if you guys already know about it and started it and stuff. I'll blame the forum search if that's the case.

[Aklyon]

Does this require the screen saver to be changed or anything? because this sounds nice, but I like the electric sheep screensaver of awesomeness.

[Vector]

There's also GIMPS.

[smigenboger]

I'm hooked on the electric sheep screen saver too.

[Agdune]

I ran WCG for about 2 years straight, untill my computer's CPU got too old to run anything effectively anymore. At that point I was forced to stop running it because otherwise it took forever to do anything. Once I get a new CPU in a year or so, then I'll be running it again. Felt like I was contributing

[Cheeetar]

So, how do I join the Dwarf Fortress team? I can't find it using the sites search.

[Aklyon]

So, how do I join the Dwarf Fortress team? I can't find it using the sites search.

There isn't one, it sounded like. Strike The Earth List! Make One!

[Protactinium]

So, how do I join the Dwarf Fortress team? I can't find it using the sites search.

There isn't one, it sounded like. Strike The Earth List! Make One!

This. I haven't made a group myself because it seems that you can only be in one team at a time, and I'm already part of another group for that other game I play. I simply highly encourage the Dwarf Fortress crowd to get involved in this themselves because it's a great cause that I think seems highly relevant to the large number of intelligent, educated people that hang around these forums.

[Cheeetar]

Team. It has no description because I absolutely suck at this sort of thing.

[Duuvian]

If this is the case, why can't you have a corporation simply buy you thousands of computers? Or one really good one? This sounds like some sort of scam, but I don't really know much about it. It could as well be fueling spambots as much as it's curing aids.

[Pillow_Killer]

If this is the case, why can't you have a corporation simply buy you thousands of computers? Or one really good one? This sounds like some sort of scam, but I don't really know much about it. It could as well be fueling spambots as much as it's curing aids.

Lol. There are more than half a million of running processing nodes at the moment. WCG was funded by IBM, byu the way.
"Really good computer" Define a really good computer.
Thousands is not enough, as I said. You need much, much more processing pwoer than that, and for that, distributed computing system works like a charm, as they dont have to pay for CPU cycles and traffic is cheap.

[HAMMERMILL]

Uh, well that crazy leftist radical side of me makes me thing this is a plot to gather marketing information, browsing habits and whatnot from people's computers and as a sort of tax on people's bandwidth. I'm sure corporations could make money to fund their research by selling the results of their marketing research.

Computing power isn't expensive, you know. Also, I'm not sure why they'd need an inordinate amount to do research on something other then physics or mathematic-intensive feilds.

Also not convinced it won't be used by law enforcement to keep an eye on people's internet usage.

[Retro]

My computer rarely has cycles to spare. I play DF.

[Protactinium]

Uh, well that crazy leftist radical side of me makes me thing this is a plot to gather marketing information, browsing habits and whatnot from people's computers and as a sort of tax on people's bandwidth. I'm sure corporations could make money to fund their research by selling the results of their marketing research.

Computing power isn't expensive, you know. Also, I'm not sure why they'd need an inordinate amount to do research on something other then physics or mathematic-intensive feilds.

Also not convinced it won't be used by law enforcement to keep an eye on people's internet usage.

If this is the case, why can't you have a corporation simply buy you thousands of computers? Or one really good one? This sounds like some sort of scam, but I don't really know much about it. It could as well be fueling spambots as much as it's curing aids.

I'm not quite a scientist nor a network-security design guy so I can't really answer these things authoritatively. Here is the Wikipedia page on the BOINC client that you download to participate in the World Community Grid--the program itself, which is where your concerns for possible spying and hacking would lie.
As for to computing power not being expensive, the article on Grid Computing has this paragraph:

Grids versus conventional supercomputers

“Distributed” or “grid” computing in general is a special type of parallel computing that relies on complete computers (with onboard CPU, storage, power supply, network interface, etc.) connected to a network (private, public or the Internet) by a conventional network interface, such as Ethernet. This is in contrast to the traditional notion of a supercomputer, which has many processors connected by a local high-speed computer bus.

The primary advantage of distributed computing is that each node can be purchased as commodity hardware, which when combined can produce similar computing resources to a multiprocessor supercomputer, but at lower cost. This is due to the economies of scale of producing commodity hardware, compared to the lower efficiency of designing and constructing a small number of custom supercomputers. The primary performance disadvantage is that the various processors and local storage areas do not have high-speed connections. This arrangement is thus well suited to applications in which multiple parallel computations can take place independently, without the need to communicate intermediate results between processors.

The high-end scalability of geographically dispersed grids is generally favorable, due to the low need for connectivity between nodes relative to the capacity of the public Internet.

There are also some differences in programming and deployment. It can be costly and difficult to write programs so that they can be run in the environment of a supercomputer, which may have a custom operating system, or require the program to address concurrency issues. If a problem can be adequately parallelized, a “thin” layer of “grid” infrastructure can allow conventional, standalone programs to run on multiple machines (but each given a different part of the same problem). This makes it possible to write and debug on a single conventional machine, and eliminates complications due to multiple instances of the same program running in the same shared memory and storage space at the same time.

I hope a proper biologist or chemist could come into the thread in order to help address:

Also, I'm not sure why they'd need an inordinate amount to do research on something other then physics or mathematic-intensive feilds.

If you've noticed how Dwarf Fortress runs so slowly with hardly any graphics to understand, it's partially because it tries to accurately model as many things as it can. It doesn't skimp or cut corners on simulation for a lot of things that other game programmers would. I would imagine this is then parallel to modeling a protein molecule or chromosome and keeping track of all the parts of the genetic code or alleles or whatever it might be. Of course, I could be wrong on the Dwarf Fortress analogy.

Ultimately, since I can't give you absolute answers to everything, I can understand a healthy skepticism not to download a program that sends data from its client on your computer to a server that you don't control. I've been using it for more than a month without problem, and I have a trust bias in computer things that help out science--my father is a biologist himself (though he doesn't work with computers for modeling) and I've grown up with the idea that the majority of scientists are dedicated to their work and are therefore honest when it comes to things like this. The safety of your computers is no matter of faith however, and until someone else with more knowledge on the things involved comes into the thread, I can't reasonably persist in trying to persuade you that it's safe and nothing bad can happen.

However, a google search on "safety of boinc" gives this thread which goes off-topic about anti-virus and firewalls but provides a couple key posts:

OP:

I do have one question. I've spoken about BOINC and SETI to friends and people at work. Many of them have expressed fears about the security of the system.
While I don't have any important information in my hard drive, many people do and aren't willing to expose themselves.
Have there been any instances of hackers breaking into the computers of participants?

Replies:

To my knowledge no (through Boinc itself). Please get second opinion as I have only been on the boards about 11 months and may have missed stuff earlier. I can't see how Boinc is anymore insecure than a computer playing a game over the net. You download Boinc from the offical source and join legit projects. If you have a firewall you set it up correctly and only allow access to certain places and ports. I mean when you play a game online you have to connect to server and usually have several ports open for the game. In may opinion they both have the same risk.
Boinc is not always connected to net. It only connects either when you let/tell it or when it needs to send results back or download more work. I don't think it sits there leaving a port open all the time. You can also have your computer(s) set to 'hidden'. So we can't see them. Thus it is even harder for us to gather information on you to start an attack.

I think you are being a little over cautious. Using the BOINC application and crunching for SETI creates almost zero threat to you or your PC. It is far more likely that your other internet activities might cause you problems. However as BOINC only connects to a specific site and has it's own protocol you are unlikely to suffer an attack because of SETI.

I know of no instances of hackers breaking into the computers of participants. Your friends fears are a normal response of people with a small amount of knowledge of computers & the internet. Berkley University is trusted, & I sincerely doubt they would jeopardize their studies by leaving gapping security leaks in their system.

That being said, ANY forum ANYWHERE could be subjected to hackers. Anytime you hook your computer to the outside world you are in effect putting yourself out there. If your computer browses the internet & receives email, you are subject to spam, viruses, adware, spyware, & rootkit invaders. You should always follow some commonsense rules....
1. And most importantly is a good quality virus detector. And a good quality firewall.
2. Never put your email address in any forum (including the SETI boards)
Whoever said the internet is like the Wild West was not joking. Packing your own heat is the only way to protect yourself. (You government is NOT going to help you by passing laws against syware/adware)

Again, I trust the institutions that the BOINC client and the WCG system come from, which is why I feel confident using the client. I hope you can also trust everything I've shown you so far; if you just simply still don't feel comfortable, we're not gonna peer pressure or guilt you. ;P

[Grakelin]

This has been around for years. If it was a scam, it would have been made apparent by now.

It was originally linked to me by a med student, if it's anything consolation.