TA DC Projects | Science

Science

SETI@home Classic [SETI]

SETI@Home is the largest public distributed computing project in terms of computing power.

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a scientific area whose goal is to detect intelligent life outside Earth. One approach, known as radio SETI, uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. Such signals are not known to occur naturally, so a detection would provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology.

Radio telescope signals consist primarily of noise (from celestial sources and the receiver's electronics) and man-made signals such as TV stations, radar, and satellites. Modern radio SETI projects analyze the data digitally. More computing power enables searches to cover greater frequency ranges with more sensitivity. Radio SETI, therefore, has an insatiable appetite for computing power.

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SETI@home Boinc [SETI]

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Evolution@home [EAH]

This first simulator targets a phenomenon known from population genetics: Muller's ratchet in asexual populations. It describes the stochastic accumulation of slightly deleterious mutations in genomes over evolutionary time. If this happens in a species, it might be driven to extinction not due to environmental, but due to genetic reasons: the best genomes available become increasingly contaminated by mutations that are harmless, if rare, but dangerous, if frequent in a genome.

Comparing the data from these parameter space searches with the parameters found in biology, will help estimate the extent to which genomic decay by Muller's ratchet indeed does contribute to the extinction of species. To understand it, is essential for fighting it.

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eOn [EON]

A common problem in theoretical chemistry, condensed matter physics and materials science is the calculation of the time evolution of an atomic scale system where, for example, chemical reactions and/or diffusion occur. Generally the events of interest are quite rare (many orders of magnitude slower than the vibrational movements of the atoms), and therefore direct simulations, tracking every movement of the atoms, would take thousands of years of computer calculations on the fastest present day computer before a single event of interest can be expected to occur, hence the name EON, which is an immeasurable period of time.

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Climateprediction.net Classic [CPN]

The aim of climateprediction.net is to investigate the approximations that have to be made in state-of-the-art climate models. By running the model thousands of times (a 'large ensemble') we hope to find out how the model responds to slight tweaks to these approximations - slight enough to not make the approximations any less realistic. This will allow us to improve our understanding of how sensitive our models are to small changes and also to things like changes in carbon dioxide and the sulphur cycle. This will allow us to explore how climate may change in the next century under a wide range of different scenarios. In the past estimates of climate change have had to be made using one or, at best, a very small ensemble (tens rather than thousands!) of model runs.

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Climateprediction.net Boinc [CPN]

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Distributed Particle Accelerator Design [DPAD]

The experiment is called the Neutrino Factory, scheduled for construction some time around 2015. Its primary aim is to fire beams of neutrinos (fundamental particles) through the Earth's interior to detector stations on different continents. They're doing this to measure whether they change type en route (there are 3 types of neutrino) and data from this in turn will allow them to determine the neutrino's mass (and whether it even has mass).

The neutrino is just about the most common particle in the universe (billions pass through your body every second) and if it has mass, this could cause the universe to eventually re-collapse on itself. Knowing the mass will also allow scientists to make better models of how the universe began.

The machine that's being built (costing at least $1.9bn) has several scientific aims. The neutrinos are used for fundamental physics experiments, but the proton beam that is produced at the start (this hits the target rod at the beginning of the simulation you download) is also going to be used in experiments for neutralizing radioactive waste by transmuting the radioactive elements into stable ones.

You are simulating the part of the process where the protons hit a target rod and cause pions to be emitted, which decay into muons, which then proceed to a storage ring and decay into electrons and neutrinos. This is a fairly critical part of the apparatus, which catches the pions and confines some of them into a beam while they decay into muons. The efficiency of this dictates that of the entire machine.

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Lifemapper [LM]

It uses the Internet and leading-edge information technology to retrieve records of millions of plants and animals in the world's natural history museums. Lifemapper analyzes the data, computes the ecological profile of each species, maps where the species has been found and predicts where each species could potentially live.

Researchers will be able to model and simulate the spread of emerging diseases, plant and animal pests, or invasive species of plants and animals and their effects on natural resources, agricultural crops and human populations.

Environmental scientists will be able to model and predict the effects of local, regional or global climate change on Earth's species of plants and animals. Land planners and policy-makers will be able to identify the highest priority areas for biodiversity conservation. Teachers, students and the public will be able to discover and map their backyard biodiversity and how it might be affected by changes in rainfall or temperature or by the spread of other species.

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Distributed Hardware Evolution Project [DHEP]

Design the next generation of self-diagnosing computer circuits.

Self-Diagnosing Hardware is capable of detecting deviations from its normal behaviour due to faults. Self-Diagnosis is important especially in mission critical systems such as medical equipment, transport controllers and those in hazardous environments such as space missions and nuclear power stations.

As an increasing number of mission critical tasks are automated, self-checking circuits are of paramount importance. For example in medical applications (heart monitors, pacemakers), transport (aeroplane hardware, traffic lights, car ABS braking), space (satellites, probes) and industrial facilites (nuclear power plants) and more to come in the future as cars start driving themselves, surgical operations are performed remotely, etc..

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Large Hadron Collider [LHC]

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest scientific instrument. It is currently being built at CERN on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland. When it is switched on in 2007, it will accelerate beams of protons to unprecedented energies in a 27km long circular tunnel. The two particle beams will travel in opposite directions around this loop and at four points on the ring, their paths will intersect, and particles will collide head-on with particles traveling in the opposite direction. At the intersection points, scientists are building four huge detectors, the size of cathedrals, to detect the results of the collisions.

Scientists have found that everything in the Universe is made from a small number of basic building blocks called elementary particles, governed by a few fundamental forces.Some of these particles, such as the electron, are stable and form normal matter. Others, such as the muon, have a fleeting existence before decaying to the stable ones. Still others, such as the Higgs boson, are believed to have existed for a few instants after the Big Bang, but they are absent in today's universe.

Therefore, studying particle collisions is like "looking back in time", recreating the environment present at the origin of our Universe.

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Einstein@Home [EAH]

Albert Einstein discovered long ago that we are adrift in a universe filled with waves from space. Colliding black holes, collapsing stars, and spinning pulsars create ripples in the fabric of space and time that subtly distort the world around us. These gravitational waves have eluded scientists for nearly a century. Exciting new experiments will let them catch the waves in action and open a whole new window on the universe - but they need your help to do it!

Einstein@Home is a project developed to search data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US and from the GEO 600 gravitational wave observatory in Germany for signals coming from rapidly rotating neutron stars, known as pulsars. Scientists believe that some pulsars may not be perfectly spherical, and if so, they should emit characteristic gravitational waves, which LIGO and GEO 600 will begin to detect in coming months.

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XtremLab [XLAB]

XtremLab is a project running on the Boinc Desktop Grid platform. Contrary to other projects, we do not use grid for computations about physics, mathematics or biology: we study the grid technology itself. We study actual performances and try to combine various grid technologies in order to find how to improve performances of all others projects. The results of this project will benefit all other distributed computing projects, and will be published for free.

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orbit@home [OAH]

orbit@home is be a BOINC-based project which uses the Orbit Reconstruction, Simulation and Analysis (ORSA) framework "to monitor the impact hazard posed by Near Earth Objects."

The basic idea is that the computations needed to monitor the impact hazard posed by Near Earth Objects can be distributed over a big number of clients. ORSA provides the numerical library needed to propagate the orbit of the NEOs, while BOINC provides the system to distribute work units, collect the results and perform many other tasks.

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PlanetQuest [PQT]

PlanetQuest is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization whose mission is to inspire global participation in the discovery of planets. It is a direct link between you and the stars, through the help of our professional astronomers. When you join PlanetQuest, you begin to contribute to our collective understanding of the universe right away! All you need is a computer and an Internet connection.

PlanetQuest's scientific mission is the discovery—by PlanetQuesters—of thousands of new planets in our galaxy within the next five years. Over 150 planets around other stars have been discovered since 1995. The difficulty is that planets around other stars are too small and faint to be seen directly. Their presence must be determined indirectly through a process that requires careful analysis of very large amounts of astronomical data.

Our free Collaboratory software turns your computer into an astronomical observatory and resource library. Our telescopes are focused on extremely dense star regions, such as the center of the galaxy in Sagittarius, and when an observing run ends and thousands of images have been collected, data will be downloaded to your computer and your Collaboratory software will begin analyzing it.

In less than a month, you should know whether you have a planet candidate. But even if you don't yet, you will have discovered important new information about that star—information that will contribute to our overall understanding of the universe. With our telescopes and your computer, you'll make real discoveries at the frontiers of knowledge.

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