World Community Grid

[Rasbelin]

Oh noes. They're esentially tearing down all results and ranks. Darn, I thought I could still have some chances to make to the top ranks in this team, but now my ego trip won't be long. Blaspheme!

Size and ranking does matter.

[Donegeal]

Ah.. what they hell... I'll put my lazy computer to work...

[H Tower]

never participated in one of these before, sure, why the hell not?

[Richelieu]

Any updates on new projects?

[Asher]

Their schedule seems to indicate the new projects will be announced "3/31/06", after the 4th review cycle.

World Community Grid supports research that is:

* Focused on solving problems to benefit humanity;
* Conducted by public or nonprofit organizations;
* Contributed to the public domain; and
* Accelerated by grid computing technology.

Research projects that benefit from grid technology are those that perform computations that require millions of computer processing units (CPUs) and that can be divided into smaller independent computations.

They give some examples of the proposals they're looking at:

* New and existing infectious disease research - development of treatments for HIV/AIDS, Malaria, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), etc.
* Genomics and disease - functions of proteins that are coded by human genes and how they might relate to cures for common diseases
* Environmental research - meteorology and severe weather warning, pollution, remediation, climate modeling, and others
* Natural disasters and hunger - earthquake warning, information on improving crop yields and livestock production, and evaluation of the supply of critical natural resources such as water

[Asher]

Latest status of the current protein folding project:

[Asher]

They must have a couple new projects coming by November then?

[Richelieu]

You would think so. I wonder if they will decide to split the grid to do multiple projects at once. They could start 3 or 4 and give you a choice of which one you want to participate in.

[Rasbelin]

Finally got myself added as the new PC is ready for some data crunching. So far I'm disappointed with the WCG client interface. Abit too simplistic. Especially that you edit the device profile online.

[Richelieu]

Originally posted by Rasbelin
Finally got myself added as the new PC is ready for some data crunching. So far I'm disappointed with the WCG client interface. Abit too simplistic. Especially that you edit the device profile online.

Stop whining and fold those proteins!!!

[Rasbelin]

Seems like I'm currently folding an average 1-2 data units per day. Pretty much what I used to get with SETI@Home. Remember that this is under load from other applications. Oh well, hopefully at least some usefulness in doing this, despite getting to the top 10 might take quite a few months.

But we'll see what those new projects will be.

[Asher]

As you can see we’re progressing at a pretty constant rate now. With only a small fraction of the folding left and Dec-2005 right around the corner we’ve (Lars Malmstroem, Rich Bonneau, Mike Riffle :: at the UW and the ISB) been focusing on getting the results formatted for biologists. A prototype of the database is up for yeast and some other bugs and should be up for Human soon Thanks all you volunteers for cranking through so many proteins so far…. So far the average volunteer has folded 5 million protein conformations, most of which are upstairs on the disk-pack (not to mention the bazillion confs the scoring fnx has kicked out)!

[Asher]

More info:

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread?thread=4080

First, the average work unit run time is tunable by us. For example, the set of work units needed to process a given gene can be tuned in length and quantity. For example 20 10-hour-work-units could be used to process the same amount of total work as 10 20-hour-work-units. The overall result is the same, but members get more frequent feedback when shorter running work units are used. However, our servers have to handle more network traffic running shorter work units. For now, we are quite happy with the 10-hour average. At the start of the project our average was 20 hours and because of the wide variation in difficulty of particular work units (the part of the estimation we cannot predict), those work units were sometimes getting in the 200-300 hour run-time range. So, by cutting the average in half, the really long ones got cut in half on average (we still see some in the 100+ hour range) and the really short ones are as just a couple hours or so. So the trade-off is network bandwidth and average work unit run time. We will continue to keep them shorter unless we find that for some reason they need to be lengthened (or shortened).

We do not run easier genes or anything like that. I have found relatively little variation in the overall time to process any given batch of work. A batch of work consists of approximately 1000 genes. Once in a while we see that a few genes create monster run times, but that is just part of the normal variation and unpredictability of how hard it is to fold a particular protein.

As for redundancy, currently each work unit is sent to a minimum of 6 machines. However, machines sometimes lose work for whatever reasons and come back for new work, so not all of the assigned work gets finished and returned. We send out more of these straggler work units to additional machines. And as time grows longer we also relax the redundancy compare requirement somewhat for the last small percent of the work units. Without these measures, our disk storage would run out before the oldest batch gets finished. We would probably have to reprocess the all the batches under way from a clean slate, because it would be hard to patch everything up after running out of space. We process the returned results around the clock so that we can free up space used by finished work units. Even so, we sometimes get dangerously close to running out of disk space, so we have to keep a close eye on everything. In fact, we are planning a large disk space increase to better accommodate this and new projects. We will soon be announcing a several hour outage to let us restructure our storage layout.

We have set the minimum physical memory requirement at 128MB. We wanted as many machines as possible that could reasonably contribute, so we didn't want to set this value too high. However, we do depend very much on virtual memory. The Rosetta program allocates approximately 200MB of memory, which obviously does not fit in 128MB. However, once the computation gets under way, the working set size is only about 25MB, so the 128MB machines can typically handle this, albeit with some extra paging activity. We do find that quite a few member machines have their maximum virtual memory size set too low or have other applications consuming most of the virtual memory allotment. This crashes Rosetta and that work unit ends up not being finished by that machine. Some of the future projects may have much higher hardware requirements and might not be suitable for all of the member machines. We hope to keep a mix of projects going, some of which require less resources so that as many member machines as possible can contribute. Also, in the future we hope to develop the ability to assign shorter work units to slower machines, so that their run times are not so long.

FWIW, that is my long winded 2 cents on the subject.

[Asher]

Also, a Linux client is due out next month in time for the next projects.

IBM has also set their internal software management tool, ISSI, to install World Community Grid by default on all of its PCs (unless the user chooses to disable it).

Given how massive IBM's PC network is, this should be a considerable boost in processing power.

[Skanky Burns]

Strange they hadn't done so before now.