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Thursday, 16-04-2020

“You don’t have to be a scientist to do science.”

Supporting scientific research with processing power: because with free computer capacities, any company can support and even accelerate research projects worldwide.

The corona crisis is forcing many companies to take drastic measures, ranging from time off in lieu, holiday leave, sick leave or short-time working allowance. One aspect that many might not be aware of is that these measures free up a large amount of computer capacities, which in turn can help other companies and support them in their research projects.

 

It’s about processing power: the PC in service of research. Especially in the current situation, many employees are working from home with their own PCs, meaning that their computer is free, but also in general: How often is the laptop left unused on the desk or only uses part of its potential performance? Researchers worldwide can benefit from this surplus processing power. Instead of using a large and expensive supercomputer, the project uses BOINC software, developed at the US University of Berkeley, to connect countless small computers and harness their combined processing power.

 

With BOINC, your computer (Windows, Mac, Linux) or Android device can help with the latest scientific research. BOINC downloads scientific computer tasks to your computer and executes them invisibly in the background. It’s simple and safe. You can decide for yourself how your computer handles the data. Whether it only parses data when you aren’t currently using your computer, whether the BOINC client is constantly running, how much processing power is used – the choice is yours. The only cost factor is the non-negligible energy consumption, as the computer no longer switches to stand-by mode, but continues to run non-stop throughout the day. However, the computer doesn’t have to be permanently online to support the research work.

 

Approximately 30 research projects currently use BOINC. These include, for example:  Einstein@Home, IBM World Community Grid und SETI@home. These projects study diseases and global warming, discover pulsars and conduct many other types of scientific research.

 

As we did some years ago, we once again started supporting BOINC with our processing power on 22 March 2020. Our processing power contributes to the Rosetta@home project, which has already completed 394,338 tasks. For the sake of comparison: an average user performs around 10,000 tasks. Rosetta@home is currently being used during the coronavirus pandemic to predict the structure of proteins that are important for the disease and to produce new, stable miniproteins that can be used as potential therapeutics and diagnostics.

 

Join forces with the worldwide research community by making your surplus processing power available to help advance research projects, such as collecting and analysing data on the current coronavirus pandemic! Let’s work together and defeat COVID-19!

 

http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/