Updating Sticky

[jasong]

Hey, guys, the Sticky seems to be getting a little dated, and my ability to edit the posts in there went away a long, LONG time ago.

I think what we need is:

1)Update the signup links and make sure the ones we have are still relevant, and...

2)List descriptions of each project. I'm thinking each project could have it's own description link within each forum and the main BOINC Sticky could attach to it.

Additionally, I feel we need to have a main forum thread that deals with the dependability of each project.

[Bok]

If you feel up to it, just create a new post with all of the info then I'll copy it into the sticky :)

Or anyone else for that matter..

Bok :cheers:

[PCZ]

"If you feel up to it, just create a new post with all of the info then I'll copy it into the sticky "

My thoughts also ;)

[jasong]

Considering how much time I have on my hands, and I'll only be on something resembling a schedule tonight(college thing, even though I haven't attended in a couple years, lol), I should be able to whip something up over the weekend.

No promises, though. Especially with that boxed HDTV in the hallway(even though we don't get HD programming, I think my dad just got the spending bug). pretty soon, I'll be able to sympathize with my namesake's memory loss as if he's in the room.

You go tell Sonny what he can do with goons, Jason!!! Yeah, boy!!!

Off-topic: for those of you who are familiar with my posts, many of you have just now realized that I either didn't get my sleep aid machine or I'm having trouble adjusting to it. It's the second answer. That things blows in more ways than one, I feel like I'm facing a gale when I put the thing on.

[jasong]

What do you guys think of quoting everything below "Notes:" verbatim in the Sticky? I guess my biggest worry is that I'm quoting the projects verbatim, which could be considered Copyright Infringement. But I'm not being paid, and it's advertising for them, so I'm not going to worry.

Notes:

Climate Prediction:
What is climateprediction.net?
Climateprediction.net is the largest experiment to try and produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century. To do this, we need people around the world to give us time on their computers - time when they have their computers switched on, but are not using them to their full capacity.
[read more about the experiment]

Why?
Climate change, and our response to it, are issues of global importance, affecting food production, water resources, ecosystems, energy demand, insurance costs and much else. There is a broad scientific consensus that the Earth will probably warm over the coming century; climateprediction.net should, for the first time, tell us what is most likely to happen.

What do we want you to do?
You can download a climate model from this website. It will run automatically as a background process on your computer whenever you switch your computer on. It should not affect any other tasks you use your computer for. As the model runs, you can watch the weather patterns on your, unique, version of the world evolve. The results are sent back to us via the internet, and you will be able to see a summary of your results on this web site.

Einstein@Home
Einstein@Home is a program that uses your computer's idle time to search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors. Einstein@Home is a World Year of Physics 2005 project supported by the American Physical Society (APS) and by a number of international organizations.

Einstein@Home is available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh OS X computers.

Einstein@Home is currently searching the most sensitive 600 hours of data from LIGO's fourth science run, S4.

LHC@Home
What the program does:

Most of the scientific computing challenges that the LHC experiments are facing will require access to huge amounts of storage - the LHC will produce 15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data per year. These data requirements means that most analysis programmes cannot be run on individual PCs. This is why CERN is leading the development of Grid computing, which aims to link hundreds of major computing centres around the world.

However, there are exceptions where public computing makes sense for the LHC. CERN's IT Department is interested in evaluating the sort of technology that is used by SETI@home for future use. A program called SixTrack, which simulates particles traveling around the LHC to study the stability of their orbits, can fit on a single PC and requires relatively little input or output.

SixTrack was developed by Frank Schmidt of the CERN Accelerators and Beams Department, based on an earlier program developed at DESY, the German Electron Synchrotron in Hamburg. SixTrack produces results that are essential for verifying the long term stability of the high energy particles in the LHC. Lyn Evans, head of the LHC project, says that "the results from SixTrack are really making a difference, providing us with new insights into how the LHC will perform".

Typically SixTrack simulates 60 particles at a time as they travel around the ring, and runs the simulation for 100000 loops (or sometimes 1 million loops) around the ring. That may sound like a lot, but it is less than 10s in the real world. Still, it is enough to test whether the beam is going to remain on a stable orbit for a much longer time, or risks losing control and flying off course into the walls of the vacuum tube. Such a beam instability would be a very serious problem that could result in the machine being stopped for repairs if it happened in real life.

By repeating such calculations thousands of times, it is possible to map out the conditions under which the beam should be stable.

SETI@Home
(I seem to remember hearing somewhere that their main goal has nothing to do with Alien Intelligence, but they make that claim in order to get people to crunch. Sort of like an oceanographer getting grant money by claiming they're searching for "The Great whale, Moby Dick!" Don't quote me, though)

What is SETI@home?

SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.

Predictor@Home
What is Predictor@home?

Predictor@home is a world-community experiment and effort to use distributed world-wide-web volunteer resources to assemble a supercomputer able to predict protein structure from protein sequence. Our work is aimed at testing and evaluating new algorithms and methods of protein structure prediction. We recently performed such tests in the context of the Sixth Biannual CASP (Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction) experiment, and now need to continue this development and testing with applications to real biological targets. Our goal is to utilize these approaches together with the immense computer power that can be harnessed through the internet and volunteers all over the world (you!) to address critical biomedical questions of protein-related diseases.

Cell Computing
When I went to the Cell Computing web page, it gave a bunch of user-unfriendly Japanese characters. You'd think somebody would've made a halfway decent redirect page by now. O, well, when they get their act together, someone can cobble in(no pun intended) the description.

[Bok]

Certainly better than nothing! I think it's pretty good. Updated the sticky :thumbs:

I had to do a reply as adding it to your post in there, goes over the limit for #chars in a post.

Bok