Not a word on BOINC in this message, maybe somewhere else where the newsflash is carried forward, but WCG through it's sole financial sponsor won the Business in the Community (BITC) Coffey Award for Excellence. http://www.bitc.org.uk/media_centre/press_releases/international_award.html

Also reported in ISGTW.

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Kathryn :o)

Progress Thru Processors is now offically launched.

Press Release

It is a joint project between Intel, GridRepublic, and BOINC.

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----- Rom
BOINC Development Team, U.C. Berkeley
My Blog

Progress Thru Processors is now offically launched.

Press Release

It is a joint project between Intel, GridRepublic, and BOINC.

Ars Technica - Intel introduces distributed computing to Facebook

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Superlink@Technion

isGWT Feature – Superlinks to identify genetic culprits

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Kathryn :o)

BOINC in the news at PC World.com

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"There's no such thing as normal people...Just abnormal people with delusions of grandeur"

An article about BOINC in Dutch: BOINC: doneer ongebruikte rekenkracht

It also mentions GR/Facebook and their Progress Through Processors range of BOINC.

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Not really BOINC in the news, but it's Carl Sagan in the comics, and I wanted to try out the new editing controls.

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-- Eric Myers

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats

BOINC in the news in a negative setting.

User "NEZ" was found out to be using both BOINC and Seti@Home to amass his 578 million credits and counting, on school computers that he had asked no permission for to use. He has since been fired and is facing criminal charges.

Newsbit one
Newsbit Two

When asked for a comment from the BOINC developers, they told me they have been aware of the situation for a couple of days now, since the police contacted them over this issue.

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In the German local television (WDR) news magazine "Aktuelle Stunde" was a 4:30 minute feature about BOINC:
Rechnen für die gute Sache (Computation for the good cause)
Also direct available as Podcast, of course in German ;).

Der WDR hat in seinem Nachrichtenmagazin "Aktuelle Stunde" einen 4:30 Minuten langen Beitrag zu BOINC gesendet:
Rechnen für die gute Sache

Es gibt ihn auch direkt als Podcast zum Download.

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Gruesse vom Saenger

For questions about Boinc look in the BOINC-Wiki

Although BOINC is not mentioned, the Colatz conjecture appears in today's xkcd comic

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-- Eric Myers

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats

International Science Grid This Week (iSGTW) for 17 March 2010: Case Study: Einstein@OSG

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-- Eric Myers

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats

Re: Sek's reference to the video of the guy in Arizona
I just saw this, filling some time in my office. One must admit that in a way this is just hysterically funny. 578 million credits. I wonder what those Extreme guys at WCG would do for 579 million credits.

Thanks for the hoot.

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http://sciencesprings.wordpress.com
http://facebook.com/sciencesprings

From the BBC:

Alternative supercomputer powers

Supercomputers are the super models of the technology world.
They get the headlines, the glossy photos and set their fans drooling over their vital statistics. But the machines that feature on the lists of the most powerful computers on Earth are not the only powerful computers on Earth. There are many alternative supercomputer powers that do their work without all the hoopla.

For some, the biannual Top 500 list - which ranks the fastest machines in the world - is artificial. It is as much about flag waving as it is about working out who has the biggest machine. "You have to bear in mind that many of the big computer systems have not declared their existence," said Dr John Lockley, manager of the Oxford Supercomputing Centre. "You never get any details of those but they are big drivers of the technology."

Old iron

One of the other big pools of unseen computer power is made up of mainframes, usually IBM mainframes. These machines were the original supercomputers and until the arrival of the mini-computer and then the PC were the mainstays of the computer world. "They are still being widely used in particular segments such as finance, retail, health and government," said Jim Porell, an IBM evangelist for the machines.

When we get cash out of an ATM, said Mr Porell, it will be a mainframe that will handle the back-end data processing of that transaction. Book an airline ticket and choose your seat on the plane and chances are that you are unknowingly using a mainframe. The machines are being used because they are used to running constantly at nearly 100% capacity. And, said Mr Porell, they have other advantages over Intel-based racks of servers.

One IBM System z10 Enterprise Class mainframe, the biggest, is equal to 1,500 Intel servers and occupies 85% less space. "We measure meantime between failure in decades," he said. IBM does not say exactly how much cash is generated by selling and servicing mainframes, but the division of the company that makes them, amongst other things, was worth more than $5.2bn (£3.6bn) in the final quarter of 2009 suggesting that there are a lot of them about.

The machines range in computational power from smaller models that can manage 26 million instructions per second to the biggest machines that crank through 30 billion instructions per second. And, said Mr Porell, it is theoretically possible to chain 30 of the biggest machines together in one giant cluster.
While he admits that no-one has done that yet, some firms have amassed significant mainframe power. Giant US retail chain WalMart, said Mr Porell, has 54. "There's one in each distribution centre to manage the assembly line that moves goods from storage out onto the tractor trailers," he said.

Many machines

Many of the supercomputers that feature on the Top 500 list are monolithic machines, usually contained within one room or facility. The growth of the web has given rise to more distributed ways to harness computer power - usually of the humble desktop type. These projects typically take advantage of the fact that the processor inside most desktops spends most of its time idle. Rather than just let it sit doing nothing, it is getting increasingly easy to get it doing real scientific work.

One of the first to use that idle computer time was the Seti@Home project, which harnessed processors to look through reams of radio signals seeking signs of alien life. Now, many more projects are keen to tap that processing power.

"Some scientists have single jobs that they need to have done very fast like simulating an explosion or something like that," said Dr David Anderson, director and developer of the Boinc distributed computing project.

"Other scientists have many, many jobs and want to complete the whole group of them relatively fast," he said. This is where Boinc's volunteer computing project comes in. Those that download the Boinc software can offer their PC to help with one of many different scientific projects. "Volunteer computing is by and large doing the same sort of computation that people do in supercomputer centres or other conventional hardware," said Dr Anderson. Get enough PCs together and you can amass a significant amount of computer power, he said.

"There is in the order of 350,000 people running Boinc on their computer," he said. "We hope and expect that number will increase."
"Currently the largest supercomputers are 1-2 petaflops machines," he said. "We have 3 or 4 times as much power on tap." The separate Folding@Home project, which is studying the ways that proteins fold inside cells, can call on about eight petaflops of computer power. Other distributed computing projects are using games consoles such as the PlayStation 3 and Xbox as sources of compute power.

"The volunteer computing approach works for a surprisingly large fraction of all scientific tasks, about 95%," said Dr Anderson. "Those that it does not work well for are ones that require individual jobs to be done as fast as possible or require large amounts of memory."

Power play

One other unmeasured pool of computer power is under the control of the net's cyber criminals. In recent years one of the most popular hi-tech crime tactics has been to hijack home computers and put them to work for the bad guys.

A hijacked PC, typically a Windows machine, becomes part of a botnet and could be used to send out spam, as a dead drop for pirated content or as a launch platform for attacks on other websites. Some botnets are huge. The Conficker worm is thought to have racked up millions of victims. That potentially puts more computer power than anyone has ever had in the hands of the cyber thieves.

Thankfully, so far, Conficker has not been "armed" but many other smaller botnets are regularly used. The computational power they can call on is formidable, even though it is put to nefarious ends. "The largest botnet we've seen attack our customers has been in the hundreds of thousands of infected computers, although that was a while ago," said Paul Sop, chief technology officer at Prolexic which specialises in combating such networks.

"These days bots have more bandwidth than in the past, so a botnet with 30,000 computers can do more damage than larger botnets of the past for certain attacks," he said. "Pretty much every week we see a botnet attacking with around 30,000 computers."

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hi,

could anyone please do me a favour and check my bad english grammar on http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Computer_theft_solved_thanks_to_BOINC and correct it? :)

would be nice!

Andreas

Danish magazine mentions BOINC and SETI@home on page 2 in article on reusing old laptops:
http://www.altomdata.dk/nyt-liv-til-den-gamle-baerbare

Here's an interesting web page/blog
that says good things about BOINC
more good publicity for our BOINC community :)

Civilian Supercomputing: BOINC

Posted on 02/06/2011 by AdamD.

Usually when we think of supercomputers, we probably think about large, noisy computers
with arrays of blinking lights somewhere in a distant lab.
Something like WOPR from the movie "War Games"
That’s not far off, as the supercomputers of today are still very big devices.

Continue reading here ...

http://www.thebinaryidiot.com/
http://www.thebinaryidiot.com/

For those of us still attached to the project, this is fantastic news. The LHC is one of my main subjects at my blog, http://sciencesprings.wordpress.com.
I was smitten with CERN when I saw the 1985 Public Television video Creation of the Universe with Timothy Ferris. And of course, the idiots in our Congress had shot down the Superconducting Supercollider in 1993 because it had no "immediate economic value".

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http://sciencesprings.wordpress.com
http://facebook.com/sciencesprings

Sorry, I did not see the date of the post, and I had no inkling that this move had taken place in 2007.

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http://sciencesprings.wordpress.com
http://facebook.com/sciencesprings

Thank you to whoever yesterday visited my blog ScienceSprings. I hop that you found something(s) of interest. BOINC and WCG both were part of the impetus for my starting this effort.

If you found anything of merit, please tell your colleagues. If you have any negative criticisms, please tell me, either here or in a comment at the blog.

My whole effort is aimed as the blog says to raise the visibility of the U.S. contribution to basic scientific research world wide. Did you know that almost one third of the people working at CERN are from the U.S.? But we in the States get very little news of this sort in our media, the New York Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek, CNN, whatever.

Thanks again.

>>RSM

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http://sciencesprings.wordpress.com
http://facebook.com/sciencesprings

Dr David P. Anderson - Project director, architect, and developer of BOINC posted:

On January 13th IBM announced that World Community Grid will receive half of the winnings from a man vs. machine contest on the Jeopardy! game show, to air February 14, 15 and 16, 2011.

In Watson's Wake, IBM

World Community Grid Registration Skyrockets 700%

February 18, 2011

$500,000 in IBM Jeopardy! Challenge prize money to fund global research that benefits humanity

ARMONK, NY, Feb. 18 -- Watson wasn't the only computer system that won this week when it competed successfully against two human champions on the Jeopardy! game show.

The other computing system is called World Community Grid, a virtual supercomputer that helps scientists solve humanitarian challenges by tapping the unused computing power of personal computers around the world. Scientists who use World Community Grid are not only set to receive $500,000 in prize money --

<snip>
...
...
</snip>

One additional grant will be provided to the -- University of California, Berkeley for its "BOINC operating system"

the software that runs public, volunteer-based computing efforts such as World Community Grid.

• The recipients are:
  
  
• Computing for Clean Water: Tsinghua University / China
  
• Help Conquer Cancer: Ontario Cancer Institute / Canada
  
• Help Fight Childhood Cancer: Chiba Cancer Center Research Institute & Chiba University / Japan
  
• Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together: University Texas Medical Branch & University of Chicago / USA
  
• FightAIDS@Home: Scripps Research Institute / USA
  
• Help Defeat Cancer: Cancer Institute of New Jersey, Rutgers University & University of Pennsylvania / USA
  

To put its size, power and scope and contributions into perspective, World Community Grid:

• Receives seven computational results from volunteers' PCs every second of the day -- 500,000,000 in all since World Community Grid started six years ago.
  
• Has performed computations for the equivalent of 392,000 years.
  
• Has yielded 31 scientific, peer-reviewed published papers.
  
• Performs computation for projects run by academic and research organizations on nearly every continent.
  
• Consumes only three extra watts of power on the average computer -- less than half used by a seven-watt nightlight.
  
• Performs 400 trillion floating-point operations per second.
  

Way To Go - David - for Devloping BOINC - way back in 1998 - 2002


all the years of hard work by your self and hundreds of BOINC Volunteer developers and Moderators is paying off :)

Best Wishes
Byron



read more here ...

http://www.hpcwire.com/offthewire/In-Watsons-Wake-IBM-World-Community-Grid-Registration-Skyrockets-700-116476438.html
http://www.hpcwire.com/offthewire/In-Watsons-Wake-IBM-World-Community-Grid-Registration-Skyrockets-700-116476438.html