The Mormon Transhumanist Association has formed a team to promote innovation in the field of biology by participating in the Rosetta@home project. The project is a part of the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) which is a multi-platform framework for partipating in distributed computing projects. This unified framework makes it possible for research teams to take advantage of hundreds of thousands of computers across the globe to help them compute difficult mathematical problems that exceed the computing power of even the most powerful supercomputers of today. By breaking up large problems into smaller subproblems and distributing these subproblems to many different computers over the Internet, research progress can be made at an unprecedented rate, and new classes of problems that previously exceeded computational feasibility can be undertaken.
The BOINC framework makes it possible for you to choose more than one distributed computing project to participate in and share your computer's CPU cycles among all of them, prioritizing the percentage of time that your computer spends on each project. The framework is designed so that it does not slow your computer down while you are working on it--it only ramps up its CPU usage if your computer becomes idle.
Among all the projects available on the BOINC framework, I am most convinced of the immediate usefulness of the
Rosetta@home project, which is making great progress towards mapping out the structure of many proteins which will help cure diseases such as cancer, diabetes, HIV and malaria. Besides the incredible practicality of the project, I am very confident in its leadership. I had the privilege of attending presentations by the project leader, Dr. David Baker, at the University of Washington, and I can assure you that Dr. Baker is extremely intelligent and capable, besides being very effective at communicating the findings of his research to others. I encourage you to read Dr. Baker's
project summary and to
watch a video of his presentation at UW.
To join our team and put your computer to work, follow these instructions:
- Download, install and run BOINC
- Enter the Rosetta@home project URL during the installation: http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta
- During the signup process, be sure to specify that you are a member of the Mormon Transhumanist Association team. You should be able to search for the word Mormon and find the team in the list. Our team will receive recognition for its combined computing cycles and will be named if one of our computers discovers the lowest energy state for a given protein.
Please
contact me if you have any questions.
I encourage you to involve your family and friends in this project and suggest that they install the BOINC client on their own computers. Every donated CPU cycle brings us that much closer to curing these ailments.
