Making a Difference

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Making a Difference

• Donate Your Computers Spare Time to Social
  Causes and Research

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The goals of this presentation are

• Present the idea of computer as a machine with
  the ability to do a lot of work, more than we
  usually give them
• Present the idea that the computer may be given
  constructive work to do without impacting work
  you need to do
• Give examples of useful distributed processing
  projects that benefit society
• Provide helpful links and resource pointers

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What is a computer?

• A fiendish device developed to help Bill Gates
  attain global domination?
• A handy machine you can use for watching DVDs,
  sending email and shopping for Christmahanukkwanza
  ayule gifts?
• A dumb machine that does only what its told to,
  which spends 90 of its time twiddling its
  metaphorical thumbs?
• All of the above

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This is how most people use their computers
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This is what computers are capable of
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CPU Task demo

• Demonstrating that computers are always doing
  something, often some sort of idle process
  which could be displaced with useful work

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What is distributed computing?

• Distributed computing is a method of computer
  processing in which different parts of a program
  run simultaneously on two or more computers that
  are communicating with each other over a network.
• Wikipedia page on distributed computing
• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing
  
• A primer on distributed computing
• http//www.bacchae.co.uk/docs/dist.html

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Say what?

• Imagine you have to test the numbers from 1 to 1
  million and determine which ones are prime
• Now imagine that it takes 1 second to determine
  if a number is prime. It would take about 278
  hours to check all 1 million numbers
• But if you divided the work between 10 computers,
  the work would take 27.8 hours, getting done in a
  bit over a day instead of 10 days. This is a
  trivial example of the power of distributed
  computing.

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A more complicated Distributed Computing project
could coordinate the work of millions of
computers around the world to crunch numbers in
much more complex problems, doing things like
searching for patterns in the signals detected by
radio telescopes, looking for signs of
intelligent communications in the signals. Or
modeling various processes to find cures for some
diseases. Or seeking REALLY large prime numbers
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Some great distributed processing tasks

• BOINC - Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network
  Computing http//boinc.berkeley.edu/
• Folding_at_Home - a Stanford University project that
  models protein folding to seek causes and cures
  for disease http//folding.stanford.edu
• Mersenne Prime search http//www.mersenne.org/
• Distributed.NET crypto research
  http//www.distributed.net/

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BOINC

• Biology and Medicine , e.g., Malariacontrol.net
• Mathematics and strategy games
• Astronomy/Physics/Chemistry, e.g., SETI_at_home
• Earth Sciences, e.g., Climateprediction.net
• Runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
• http//boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php

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(More about malariacontrol.net )

• http//africa-at-home.web.cern.ch/africa2Dat2Dho
  me/malariacontrol.html
• Simulation models of the transmission dynamics
  and health effects of malaria are an important
  tool for malaria control. They can be used to
  determine optimal strategies for delivering
  mosquito nets, chemotherapy, or new vaccines
  which are currently under development and
  testing.
• This is why MalariaControl.net has been created -
  to harness the volunteer computing power of
  thousands of people around the world, to help
  improve the ability of researchers to predict,
  and hence control, the spread of malaria in
  Africa.
• Based on prior experience, it is expected that
  the MalariaControl.net application will complete
  in a few months - using thousands of volunteer
  PCs - a volume of computing that would normally
  take up to 40 years to complete on the computing
  power otherwise available to the scientists who
  developed the application.
• http//news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/06/06
  12_030612_malaria.html
• As international attention is riveted by fears
  over Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), an
  older and far more deadly disease quietly ravages
  Africa malaria. Malaria kills more than a
  million people worldwide each year90 percent of
  them in Africa 70 percent children under the age
  of five.

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Folding_at_Home

• What is protein folding and how is folding linked
  to disease? Proteins are biology's workhorses --
  its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out
  these important functions, they assemble
  themselves, or "fold." The process of protein
  folding, while critical and fundamental to
  virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a
  mystery.
• Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly
  (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious
  consequences, including many well known diseases,
  such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS,
  Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many
  Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.
• Runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X - graphical
  version, text only version, screen saver
• http//folding.stanford.edu/download.html

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Mersenne Prime search

• Prime numbers have long fascinated amateur and
  professional mathematicians. An integer greater
  than one is called a prime number if its only
  divisors are one and itself. The first prime
  numbers are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, etc. For example, the
  number 10 is not prime because it is divisible by
  2 and 5. A Mersenne prime is a prime of the form
  2P-1. The first Mersenne primes are 3, 7, 31, 127
  (corresponding to P 2, 3, 5, 7). There are only
  44 known Mersenne primes.
• Runs on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OS/2
• http//www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm

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Distributed.NET crypto research

• Current Projects are RC5-72 and optimal 25 Mark
  Golomb Rulers
• Future Projects
• a. RSA Prime Factoring (The inability to quickly
  factor large composite numbers into its prime
  factors is one of the underlying assumptions of
  many cryptographic systems.)
• Possible Future Projects
• a. Factoring Fermat Numbers
• b. Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem another
  cryptography challenge.
• Runs on Windows, Mac OS X/Darwin OS/2, Linux
• http//www.distributed.net/download/clients.php

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Caveats

• Some distributed projects are better than others
  at sharing the CPU (e.g., BOINC seems good,
  Folding_at_Home is so-so)
• Some distribute projects may make heavy use of
  resources (e.g., climateprediction.net uses large
  amounts of disk space)
• I would be happy to investigate specific projects
  for anyone whos interested (email donb_at_shire.net
  or uu.hooligan_at_verizon.net)

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Summary

• Modern computers are capable of doing much more
  work than we think
• Much of this excess computer power can be donated
  to projects that distribute their workload across
  thousands of computers worldwide, in effect
  creating supercomputers whose computational
  horsepower can be brought to bear on medical
  research tasks, disease prevention, the search
  for other life out in space and research
  involving mathematics and cryptography.

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Thank you for your time!

• And please dont hesitate to contact me at any
  time about this presentation (or just to chat).
• Very best regards,
• Don Baldwin
• donb_at_shire.net / uu.hooligan_at_verizon.net

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