Next monthly meetings

posted 30/08/2009

Date	Speaker	Subject
02/09/2009	CeNIM	No meeting
07/10/2009	Dr J. ABBEELS	Freewares to secure your PC
04/11/2009	CeNIM	No meeting
02/12/2009	Dr J. ABBEELS	Freeware replacements for MS OFFICE PC and common commercial apps.
06/01/2010	CeNIM	No meeting
03/02/2010	Dr Th. DEFOUR	How to fix your network ? Remote connection : how to?
03/03/2010	Dr J. ABBEELS	WINDOWS SEVEN : general impression after a few month of usage - Choosing a new printer
07/04/2010	CeNIM	No meeting
05/05/2010	Drs Th. DEFOUR & Ph. JONGEN	E-HEALTH - E-prescription and "Réseau Santé Wallon"

Let your computer work for science

using BOINC and distributed computing!

posted 04/06/2007

Most of the time your computer is idle or running far below its maximum. You can donate this unused processing power to scientific projects using distributed computing.
Basically, you give some of your computer's power to compute a small piece of a big project. Joining millions of small computers provides the power of a (very) big one.

There are many projects including medical research (modeling the proteins structure, fight against malaria, genome study, AIDS, cancer research, molecular chemistry), climate (planetary scale modeling, evolution forecasts), various scientific projects (astronomy, magnetism, fluids dynamics), mathematics...

The projects programs are handled by a dedicated software called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing).
To participate you must download and install the BOINC software. Once Boinc is installed, you must join one or more scientific projects and your computer will communicate with the project server to get work units (WU). After completion of the work unit, the Boinc client sends the result to the project server and dowloads a new unit.

On the other hand, there is a more ludic part : for each completed unit you receive an amount of points (credits).
The goal is thus to accumulate the credits and to get a better place in the national or international rankings.
Everybody knows that "the union makes the force" so the participants usually join their efforts in teams, mainly the national ones.

You can then achieve better visibility in the ranking; so Belgium is #19 in national ranking and the team I belong to is #30 in the world ranking.
Indeed, is the biggest Belgian team with more than 770 members and it is on #1 spot in the national ranking.

It's easy to join us : go on the BOINC.be website. In the tab "Projects", follow the instructions in the left MENU. In case of difficulty, go to the FORUM and register. Then you may ask your questions and get the necessary support. Most of the threads are in English but you can also send your questions in Dutch or French and you'll be answered in the same language.