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Science

Distributed Computing Applied to Medical Research 179

Posted by Hemos from the where-does-it-end dept.
Troodon writes " BBCnews SCI/TECH has an item: Screensavers could save lives , anouncing the team up between Parabon Computation and the US National Cancer Institute to apply the idle time of home computers in a Seti@homeesque manner, simulating the responce of cancer cells to potential drugs. The sweetner being the _option_ to receive a payment for your troubles. Other new start ups are jumping on the bandwagon, e.g. Popular Power's choice of contributing to research on Influenza Vaccination, or making a little money with big business. But with these companies potentially looking forward to a healthy cut in the profits of any new drugs developed etc., should us plebs look towards more honourable projects, such as trying to help research into the global warming, that all these boxes dug out retirement are going to contribute to?"
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Distributed Computing Applied to Medical Research More

Distributed Computing Applied to Medical Research

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  • I couldn't find too much info on Parabon's homepage with regards to what sort of modelling they are doing. AFAIK (and I am a PhD grad student in molecular biology) rational drug design is a hit-and-miss business, at best. Most "rational" receptor-ligand designs are usually not optimal and need to be optimized with random methods, such as repeated rounds of in vitro selection. Not sure if the dumbed down webpage is just so that the average joe can understand what is going on, or if this is some kind of scam.
  • Using multiple computers to perform multiple tasks, I guess that'd be distributed distributed computing, eh? Distributed Squared, if you will.
    Shouldn't be all that hard really should it? just write some little script or daemon or something that starts and stops the appropriate programs at set times.

  • So let me get this straight, you'd rather waste cycles

    I don't see myself wasting cycles at all. Mine are going to SETI. If SETI runs out of data, I might search for Golomb rulers.

    than do something that at least will help a few dying children?

    Read the previous reply. The "won't you help the dying children" argument is the same one as politicians use to push censorship. These projects have zero interest in the public good.

    Even though you seem resigned to the fact that only one of these "biomedical profiteers" have the means to accomplish this?

    That's bullshit. Plenty of academic researchers work on automatic parallelization of code. Bioinformatics is just as hot in schools as in industry. If the NIH or the HGP or some similar organization sets up such a project, I might contribute cycles, since a nonprofit can almost be trusted to use the results properly.

    Need I point out that the first distributed computing project was not from a corporation?

    Even though you're not risking anything other than a few nearly worthless CPU cyles, you expect them to split the payment down the middle?

    Not "middle". Obviously, I don't deserve 50%. However, I might think as high as 10% (and that's an *honest* 10%, not a 10% before creative accounting is applied) should go to the lucky person who processes the key block (or be split among those who processed multiple key blocks).

    If nothing else, you should be in favor of this because the promise of Big Bucks For Doing Nothing will attract a lot more people to run clients.

    As a medical student, perhaps you'd like to tell me just how many key devices and medicines have been developed without the involvement of these "biomedical profiteers"?

    Very well.

    Transplant surgery.
    Penicillin.
    Vaccination.
    The concept of sterile medicine.

    In those last 3, you've got nearly 90% of the power of modern medicine. All developed by individuals working pretty much for the hell of it. Now, there might be companies profiting from providing gear to achieve those things; I do not find this objectionable. If someone patented the general concept of disinfection, I'd be pretty upset.

    Now how many with?

    To the best of my knowledge, there's nothing currently on the market that was produced by a primarily-automated process, actually. (Disclaimer: I don't know that many of the modern drugs yet.)

    this particular project is worthwhile, but I'd rather produce positive results for humanity in my lifetime than cling to some utopian notions in my dreams.

    And pray tell, if it is always better to abandon utopian notions and ideals because they may not match the current reality, how do you expect things to get any better?

    To put it another way: Aim for mediocrity and you'll always hit the target.

    The more I think about this, the more I become convinced that it is downright unethical to assist for-profit efforts to do biomedical data mining. The information extracted will be treated in a fashion that is detrimental to humanity, both spiritually and physically.

    Let's forget the money for a second. Do you really want to look around twenty years from now, see the entire genome patented and restricted in public hands (with patents having been conveniently lobbied into having a life of at least 100 years), and be able to say "I helped them do this"? I don't. If a few hypothetical kids with cancer die because I tried to prevent the declaration of humanity-as-property, I think I'll be able to sleep at night.
  • Of course, any drug company worth its salt will say that your computer's idle time is being used to simulate the effects of a very important drug currently in development.

    How unfortunate that they'll forget to tell you that what you're simulating are the effects of this amazing new hair growth treatment they're working on (which is very important to them, of course, since it can bring in a boatload of cash for them)...



    --
  • With closed-source clients how do we know what they're ACTUALLY doing with our CPU time?
  • Parallel computing and medical technology, Java, "patents pending", snazzy web design, expensive PR firm (Ogilvy), micropayments, "veteran entrepreneurs", etc. Lots of buzzwords. Maybe I'm wrong, but it all looks to me like a grab for attention from VC funding, with a quick exit strategy for the founders and angel investors once it goes public. And there may be an intellectual property grab in there as well on some pretty obvious additional sandboxing, encryption, or the concept of paying people for use of their computers off-hours, something that may ultimately get in the way of free and open research uses of Java for distributed scientific computing.

    I also have my doubts about the business model itself. Even with the obvious cryptographic techniques for protecting the integrity of the executable code and protecting the communications, companies may still be able to infer things about research efforts by competitors or tamper with other people's results. For most companies, I think it is safer and less hassles just to build their own parallel machine

    Altogether, I don't see the purpose or the novelty, and I can't help but have a rather negative reaction to it all. At least, I think the company has a lot more explaining to do.

  • No more moderating up abuse!

  • not good... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    But what are the social implications of this software? 'distributed' is pretty close to 'community' and from there is a short skip-jump-and-hop to communism. These distributed systems; attempts to harness altruistic energies like this can only lead to failure. But the question is how long it's going to take to fail, and if it doesn't fail fast enough, if it appears, like Stalin's Five year plans, to reap short-term success, while rotting in the very core.

    These programs may seem to work, in the beginning, just like Distributed.net and Seti@home, gigakeys and work-units flow in, but the represent busywork, No ciphers have been cracked and no aliens found.

    Busywork is the herald of communist systems. These altruistic, cashless systems will not save lives, but rather work against them. Legitimate, profit motivated, systems will be delayed, and people will die for it.

    I am amazed that in this day and age, communist experiments are still being tried. Looking for aliens is not exactly an important thing, but these are human lives we're talking about.

  • Linux (Score:1)

    by mach-5 ( 73873 )
    OK, so when does the Linux client come out?
  • IP rush. OK--that's a good way of putting it. A comment a while back mentioned a technology getting way out in front of IP law. ITLR, maybe that; in the form of the distributed processing (DP) business model; is the only realistic way of of getting around recent extensions of copyright protections to works previously in the public domain. If lots of folks benefit from the buying & selling of CPU cycles, it seems unlikely that any of the western democracies would try to shut the busness model down. OTOH, everyone participating COULD be liable for "content"; and shut down in a fashion similar to how server admins were pressured recently w/ regard to Napster. It seems clear to me that the potential economic benefits of DP far outweigh threat of lost profits. I would think that this will cause the center of gravity in development of IP law to start to shift back toward extension of the public domain. We can't all be criminals. "The law doth punish man or woman That steals the goose off the common, But lets the greater felon loose, That steals the common from the goose." -Anon. (In 1764, when the "Enclosure Acts" were passed)
  • Watched Armageddon recently ;-)

    Seriously, I think the problem with keeping track of near-earth bodies is not the computing power available but the number of people tracking. Last I heard the total number of people tracking such bodies is equivalent to the average number of employees at a McDonald's.

  • I don't know anything about the distributed computinfg effort, but I do know about the microarray data and the NCI Lab. of Molecular Pharmacology. You can find out more about the microarray effort at the Brown-Botstein group [stanford.edu] at Stanford or at the Weinstein group [nih.gov] at NCI. This work is part of a larger effort to characterize the cell lines in the NCI cell line screen. For more information about the cell screen, see the DTP web site [nih.gov]. A real quick summary is that >35,000 compounds and >15,000 natural product extracts have been tested for their ability to inhbit the growth of 60 human tumor cell lines in culture. There has been a lot of work that shows the usefulness of analysing correlations in this data. The latest effort is to use the microarray data to look at the correlation between gene expression and ability of compounds to inhbit cell growth. I contrast to the above poster, I think this is going to be a very valuable tool and I could expand on that if anyone is interested. Also, all this data is available for download at the DTP site, so any of you that think they have a nifty idea on how to mine the data are quite welcome to download and have at it.
  • I'm not buying a shitty mac just for computations

    no, no, no... I said a G3. Besides, if you need real power, why not pick up an xtrem [xtrem.com] mac modification. It's a 1200Mhz G4.

  • Progress on SETI is not just about being able to say, "there, look -- that's alien intelligence," but also being able to say, "we did an exhaustive search here and here and here and found no evidence of alien intelligence."

    -

  • The Parabon application is pretty neat. Takes a while to install. It's only a 1.2 meg download and it installs pretty quickly. but it then takes about 3 minutes to register with the server. Displays a big 'Please Wait' flash animation but it doesn't show any progress bar to tell you what is happening.

    You can specify how much hard drive and memory it should use.. defaults are 100 meg hard drive space and 16 megs ram. That's quite a chunk of HD space. I wonder what it needs it for.

    The site is extremely informative and you can view your stats and how much your account is worth. I especially like the fact that:

    "When we begin compensating providers this Fall, you may choose to donate your earnings to a charity of your choice."

    Seems like a nice little app. I think I'll keep running it.

  • should us plebs look towards more honourable projects, such as trying to help research into the global warming

    Silly cow, global warming is the only thing holding back the Ice Age!

  • OK, all this stuff sounds pretty cool. But now the question is, which one to do? Distibuted computing is to the point now that it's no longer a big deal, and hundreds of projects will be available. Already there are dozens, if not over a hundred. So, anyone got a link that summarizes all the options?

    Jason
  • How can one mathematically predict how an biological entity is going to react to certain stimuli?
    If there's a way, sign me up. Super-advanced lifeforms would have show themselves by now if they wanted us to know about there or were even aware of us.
  • Actually, the kind of processing they might be doing would work rather well.

    I'd be willing to bet that they run an entire simulation on one computer. The kind of tests they want to run probably involves running simulations with a wide range of starting conditions. In addition, the behavior of the system might be different from run to run. This sort of project would work really well for an "@home" kind of project.
  • OK, found the info. they are doing data analysis from presumably microarray data of gene expression patterns in cancerous cell lines. this makes sense in that microarray data analysis is computationally intensive, but I still think this approach from a biology point of view is suspect. I mean, so little is known about gene functions that an analysis of alterations in expression patterns is not very useful. an analogy is, let's say you have a map of all the roads in the USA. You see things (vehicles) traveling back and forth on these roads and you see patterns of movement (rush hour), and you set up a distributed computing system to try and figure out why there are earthquakes in Los Angeles and how to prevent them. There is just not enough understanding of the system, IMHO.
  • "To ensure the integrity of results, Parabon frequently runs canary tasks. These computations have known answers. If a bad result comes back from a canary task, Parabon no longer uses that provider." Seems like a neat idea to prvent spoofing of results!

  • Sure, they could just encrypt everything, but then the code would be inscrutable

    No.

    Client-side security has always be totally pointless; if your CPU can execute the binary code, THEN you can dis-assemble it, scrutinize it, and modify its data flow as you like. If the code is encrypted, your CPU will have first to decrypt it, which means that you have the key to somewhere (well, maybe buried in a binary, but the plain key is always findable). The only way for them to ensure there is some security, is to make all data blocks redundant, and make them processed by random machines....

    However, I think the data crunching code should be executed in a kind of sandbox (a la Java), preventing it from having access to the system... This would allow users to safely execute un-verfied (or badly-verified) code in their machines...

  • I wrote a paper [foresight.org] on this sort of thing for a nanotechnology conference a few years ago. I concluded that a screensaver arrangement with infrequent inter-processor communication could work for molecular dynamics, by having the geometric space computed by each node overlap sufficiently with its neighbors. This same idea is discussed toward the end of Moravec's book Mind Children [amazon.com] in the context of running Conway's Game of Life.

    I was assuming very infrequent communication, sending email over modems every few days. If these guys can maintain direct net connectivity, the amount of overlap needed between neighboring nodes is much smaller. It would be a big win.

  • What proof that this is real and not YASH (Yet Another SETI@Home Hoax)? Suspicious things: 1) I've seen no statistics on their site. 2) Couldn't they just be lying and borrowing our processing times for a different purpose (like improving their own SETI or Distributed.net standings, or maybe they're trying to design nuclear weapons)? Don't believe everything you read online!! And especially don't trust close-source programs...
  • Tsunamis (which should NOT be called tidal waves)

    yeah, it's a crappy analogy... my original thought was "living and dying are part of a cycle too, but that doesn't mean I'm going to throw myself in front of a train..." But that would be a lie. I have thrown myself in front of a train.... mind you it was backing up at the time.

  • Most of the latest batch of highly successful chemotherapy drugs are almost completely natural, eg. not synthesized. For example Taxol is drawn from Yew trees. It's administered in a solution of concentrated Histamine so the patient has to be given high doses of antihistamine to prevent shock. Likewise, cyclosporins are extremely concentrated antibiotics purified out of weaker natural strains not that much different from most other moulds. And if you're interested most the work related to chemotherapy in recent years has not been to make them particularly more effective but instead to mitigate the more toxic side effects so that patients can tolerate them better.

  • sell your cycles (Score:3)

    by joefission ( 101644 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @05:59PM (#869204) Homepage
    How much longer will it until companies will sell their IT department's extra cycles on a block?

    Seems like a large company like IBM or Microsoft could sell theirs (theoretically they could enforce the company screen-saver/distributed computer on every machine) with a guarantee of X amount of computing for Y amount of dollars. IBM should be familar with that auditing from the mainframe heydays.

  • There's alread a project which is trying to do this. It's called COSM. http://cosm.mithral.com/

  • But wouldn't it be more honourable if, say, they didn't patent the "cure"?

    Then what's the incentive to spend billions of dollars [laskerfoundation.org] on medical research if once you find a cure anybody can create it? Once the chemical formula for a drug is known, it can be replicated rather trivially (as opposed to finding out what it is).

    Unlike free software where developers can hack code in thier free time on free operating systems while holding down a dayjob, medical research is very expensive and cannot be relegated to a hobby or leisure time filler. Equipment is expensive, doctors usually have six digit student loans [jhu.edu] (like my brother) and cannot afford to work for free, while expenses of having drugs tested and the process of having them approved by the FDA are also daunting.

    It would be nice if drugs were not patented but this would result in less expensive medical research being done, and this would benefit no one.
    FOOD FOR THOUGHT

  • Cool (Score:1)

    by JohnG ( 93975 )
    This is great, I didn't even know that computers could simulate a viruses reaction to drugs. How accurate is it?
    Distributed computing is really catching on I suppose, but I have heard alot of people say that they use the seti screensaver because it looks cool, maybe the choice of which project to help, at least for the masses, isn't which is most moral or beneficial to mankind, but which has the prettiest screensaver! ;-)

  • Does anyone else feel a MasterCard commercial coming on?

    Yes. I would have said:

    1 Computer, fully loaded: $1,500
    2 Months of electricity for computer: $40
    2 Month subscription to ISP: $45
    Curing Cancer: Priceless
  • If my CPU cycles help find a cure to cancer, I COULDN'T CARE LESS IF :

    If I didn't get paid.

    If I didn't get credit.

    If the company gets rich by said finding.

    Of course I would love that such a finding is shared and not abused by an extremly greedy company (overpriced medicine). But we need a cure for this thing NOW, and if such a trivial task does help, then participate or move aside.

  • I'm surprised process tree didn't get mentioned in the article. they're not quite live yet, but you can join their beta group. check out www.processtree.com.
  • Genious. I completely agree with these statements. Seriously, everything, EVERYTHING has a dark side, no matter how positive. Not to simply rehash what was just said, but seriously, before jumping on the bandwagon to make your extra 15 bucks a month crunching some billionaires code, take those resources and put it to some good use.
  • Ok, well at least they're starting to move in the right direction. But I still don't see why one would rather the chemotherapy with the side effects than by natural means which has no side effects at all. As it stands now, you still have to have a very strong immune system to be able to withstand chemotherapy treatment, and then it's quite likely that the cancer will come back sooner or later (since you you probably won't change your lifestyle--this is why so many people are getting cancer in the first place, after all).

    Why not strengthen your body and your immune system instead of using chemicals to kill the cancer (and possibly yourself at the same time)? For God's sake, so many people have cured themselves *without* taking chemotherapy but instead by healing their bodies, and they continue to live today because by doing so, they have shown themselves that their changed lifestyle eliminated the cancer, and naturally prevents the cancer from returning.

    Of course, your doctor will tell you all this is hogwash. Why? Because doctors have been very misled by the Big Cancer Business. It would be complete nonsense for a natural, inexpensive cure to exist. Why would we spend so much time and money perfecting the well-established cancer-killing technology like chemo, radiation and drugs? Well, because they keep the money coming into the cancer business. Cancer is Big Business. Find out for yourself.

  • Vindictive Attitude. (Score:3)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @06:06PM (#869213) Journal

    But with these companies potentially looking forward to a healthy cut in the profits of any new drugs developed etc., should us plebs look towards more honourable projects,

    This is the side of the Free Software movement that makes me sick. Theres a vindictive attitude towards capitalism, and especially any capitalism that involves intellectual property.

    If some drug company makes money *and* cures cancer using my CPU cycles, I'll be happy. Who knows, it might be my cancer they cure.

  • seti@home ISP (Score:5)

    by askheaves ( 207302 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @03:08PM (#869214)
    It could be feasible that a piece of distributed computing software could be bundled with a browser and a dial-up account in a similiar fashion to AltaVista's free service. The big difference would be that instead of banner ads taking up your screen real estate, you have to install a screen saver that crunches data.
    The business model would then be:
    Company (or research institute) needs data crunched, but does not want to pay for computers ->
    Company gives data and algorithms to @home service and pays a hefty sum ->
    @home service divies out the algorithms to people across the land next time they login to their free dialup account ->
    Data is crunched and sent back to the @home service at a reasonable rate ->
    Everybody wins :)

    Now somebody is going to get rich off of my idea... it's really painful being this dumb.


    "Blue Elf has destroyed the food!"
  • Maybe I need to be more apparant when I post JOKES...
    -Swift ::
  • I believe in the SETI program, myself. I am also impressed with the networking of computer resources. I was simply questioning the author's definition of "huge success." Perhaps 'huge popularity' would have been more precise. So, kindly take your foul comment and stuff it.
  • What projects are more honourable than working to find new cancer medications? Searching for ET is a noble endeavour, but in terms of relative importance, I don't think there's much comparison.

  • Do you have any proof? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I happen to know someone who really thinks that it is a myth. I would like a reliable source of info to point him at, but in my brief search I didn't find anything. I actually would like to see a reliable source of info for myself. It seems like everything I've seen is either left or right wing propoganda and I don't believe any of it.

    Got any good links?

    If you don't have any reliable sources and are convinced that global warming is real, it would seem that you are not so different than Mr. Falwell :)
  • Did they say *option* of getting paid?

    Who would opt out of getting paid?

    But OTOH, I am supprized at all the times my email account has been added to "opt-in" spam lists.

    Kalrand

    -the voice of reason
  • How about a new progect to map the path of comets and asteroids in our solar system. It's only a mater of time before something really big hits us, the more time we have to plan for it the better our chances...

    The only problem of course is there would be no money in it, I think to many people are more interested in the mighty dollar than what might actually be important.

  • It's irrelevant to patentability whether the calculations were done on your box, other people's boxes or an abacus. Those calculations are part of reducing an invention to practice. An inventor has to participate in conceiving the invention, which Grandma running ____@home is not going to do. She's not even going to be aware of what kind of data is running on her 1GHz AMD Linux box...
  • According to the Parabon download page [parabon.com], they are currently developing versions of their software for Linux, Mac, and other unix variants.

    Go here [parabon.com] to have them notify you when the version for the platform of your choice is ready.
  • Global warming is indeed propaganda of mythic proportions. However, reasoning from a cold summer to no trend of global warming is a titanic logical fallacy of the worst sort. It's just as bad as the local weatherman referring to global warming whenever there's a hot day.
  • I'm wondering how long it is before someone gets a patent on the "distributed computing buisness model" - where they sell you cycles of other people's system time, paying them some fraction of the fee, and they pocket the rest.

    I'm afraid this is going to head in the same direction as the "one click shopping" patents and the other assorted Amazon nonsense.

    I mean, you look at Seti (I prefer distributed.net), and you wonder how long it is before VC's start throwing money at that model. So the question is, is there a defense against this in place? Don't kid yourself and think some suit won't try and corner it all off with a strategic patent...

    [Starts scribbling a buisness plan on a napken....]

  • you can't. What I guess they are doing is looking for alterations in gene expression patterns that are beneficial to an anti-cancerous state. For instance, some genes called oncogenes are known to be tumerogenic. If a particular drug is able to shut down a network of genes that are known to be involved in oncogene regulation, then it may be a candidate as a cancer treatment drug. I'm just guessing here since their webpage is a bit dumbed down, and the scenario is a bit simplified, but that's the general idea.

    as an aside, the data collected for this analysis is probably based on microarrays [microarryas.org], or gene chips as they are sometimes called. This type of technology will benefit greatly from the human genome project and the genome sequencing efforts of other organisms.

    the problem with this approach is that too little is known about the biology of the system to make discoveries using this technology really useful. what will probably happen is that a few drugs screened in this method will be tkaen to clinical trial, then canned after a few years after clinical problems (no/little effectiveness, toxicity, side effects).
  • Here [explorezone.com] is a good site with links to everything.

    There's also an NSF study here [nsf.gov] and another study discussed on CNN [cnn.com] in which a panel of climatologists disprove dissenters' arguments against global warming. It should be noted that most scientists nowadays believe global warming has been occurring.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • Studying the global warming (and more important: trying to prevent it) by letting people run their computers as much as possible at maximum cpu utilisation, people will also use their old computers to let it crunch numbers (slowly on 3/486's) 24hr a day instead of turning them off and leaving them in a corner, allowing all these computers to generate heat, requiring more electricity and more heat to generate this electricity, and so on.. ?

    I think I'm missing the point :-)

    Can anyone btw calculate how much electricity and thus heat this seti project has already generated (the number of hours all pc's are active is available) ? I think some scientists will talk soon about the seti-disaster of global warming *grin*

  • Pardon me, but wouldn't the biggest incentive to finding the cure for cancer be to cure cancer?

    Maybe it is just me but i think it would be better to be known as the person or company that developed the cure for cancer and made it feely available for the world to reap the benefits.

    Could you imagine the ad campaigns for that company?

    "From the company that brought you the cure for cancer comes ..." whatever!

    I would rather see people put first than profits. And I would be questioning a society (or educational system) that puts doctors 6 figures in the hole upon graduating. Maybe some things need to be changed...

  • Wouldn't it be nice if we could trade our computer cycles in for, say, a tax deduction for donating my computer's time to charity. The Cancer Foundation is a charity, right? I have to admit that I can't imagine that a micropayment would induce me to rent out my spare cycles. I doubt that such a thing would even pay me enough to be worth the extra headache come tax time. Donations to charity are easy to list, income becomes a pain.

    This kind of thing is done because someone is too cheap to purchase their own computers (or clusters). In the case of SETI, there is no profit, so there's no money for computers. In the case of a Pharmaceutical company, they're just trimming their bottom line.

    Mythological Beast
  • Or MAYBE...We could rack up frequent flyer miles and go to a third world country and see what diseases we still need to work on!
    -Swift ::
  • how Slashdot breeds so much paranoia in people.

    These programs may seem to work, in the beginning, just like Distributed.net and Seti@home, gigakeys and work-units flow in, but the represent busywork, No ciphers have been cracked and no aliens found

    Mathmatically a key must exist for distributed.net and eventually someone will find it. As for SETI, no one may ever find aliens but isn't that an important discovery in itself? That would mean that we are alone or at least so far removed from any other civilization that we aren't going to find any other race for several thousands of years.

    Busywork is the herald of communist systems. These altruistic, cashless systems will not save lives, but rather work against them.

    I didn't know that computers could take political stands. Maybe we should start an activist group for computer rights.... come on! busywork is what computers are designed to do.

    Legitimate, profit motivated, systems will be delayed, and people will die for it.

    New Microsoft marketing ploy: People die from using the Linux Operating System. I mean it isn't profit motivated. Does this make me a communist too?


    Never knock on Death's door:

  • You know what'd be handy, is if someone could centralize a cpu-contribution service. Like the way United Way does it: at previous jobs, we'd get to contribute to United Way, and pick what percentages of our contributions would go to what causes.

    I use Seti@Home, which I think is worthy, but I've given them plenty of cpu cycles and I wouldn't mind spreading that around. But I'm sure, at this point, I'd need to install a new product for any new service I'd want to use.

    Wonder if someone would figure out a way to call that cpu time tax-deductible.

  • Regarding your comment of not wanting to solve other people's problems: I felt that way once as well. The tech culture is known for being *a bit* self-centered. I think thats part of having a highly desirable skill set and the potential to make tons of money at an early age. However, last year at the age of 23 I was diagnosed with lymphoma. It was the last thing I was expecting. What seemed like an '"old people's" problem became a very visceral nightmare. As a cancer survivor myself, I found the announcement to be a great step forward. As you might know current cancer treatments range from unpleasant to barbaric and it is my hope that some day we will look back on today's treatments and marvel at how primitive they were. That said, I do think that as distributed computing becomes more widespread you will have to be careful which projects you support. But, its the same situation with charities today. Some are better than others. Do your research and find a project that speaks to you. Or, if you dont like the current options, start your own...
  • I ran SETI@home for a while, and wondered what the incremental cost was to me as a user. Yes the equipment was paid for and idle. And I assume it used a few more watts of electricity (a few more bucks a year). But the bigger costs are probably hidden, and fall into two areas:

    (1) POOR SOFTWARE DESIGN. Can cause memory leaks, security issues, need to re-boot more often etc. Solution: A web site offering a range of projects I could "donate" my cycles to, with all the projects running as sub-clients under a well tested (stable, reliable, trusted) supervisory client which I would install on my machine. This would be a great open-source project.

    (2) HARDWARE RELIABILITY. Under normal use (w/o a distributed application running) my processor probably goes through thermal cycles as its workload changes. I wonder if a constant processor workload improves processor life-to-failure (by stabilizing processor temperature and minimizing expansion/contraction). If so, then running distributed software would have a very tangible benefit to users.

  • I find it amazing how many people don't know about the truth about the cancer industry. I wouldn't pay the Cancer Society a cent, let alone support some mindless organization by providing my computer to help study drug effects on cancer. I'm not against the concept of distibuted computing in any way--it's an extremely powerful tool that should be put to practical use, not mindless use.

    Every time I hear people "developing a cure for cancer" it drives me up the wall. It seems silly, in my opinion, to spend money trying to develop something that already exists. (I'm not talking about chemo or radiation or drugs. Those are obviously treatments, but they're far from being cures.)

    I know this is a bit off-topic, but I feel I have to make it known in any way I can. Check out Dr. Day's site [drday.com] or the Gerson Institute [gerson.com] for some examples of the ideas I'm talking about. Open your eyes.

  • The problem with ad-based ISPs is that, even if they create software that you can't hack to keep the ads from downloading, it's impossible to create software that you can't hack to keep the ads from displaying. With a data crunching background process ultra-niced, there is no negative impact to the user (and no annoying impact like ads), so there's no incentive to hack around the system.

    Of course, a malicious user could still hack the software so that it returned garbage results, but who would want to?

  • No. (Score:5)

    by Alik ( 81811 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @03:56PM (#869239)
    Personally, even though these guys would pay me and SETI will just suck my bandwidth, I seriously doubt you'll find one of my boxes running any of these sims. (And I'm a med student, so I've got a vested interest in finding lots of new medical miracles.)

    Why, you may ask, would I want to waste time looking for nonexistent little green men instead of helping the dying boy who had cancer but is now smothering under a heap of greeting cards?

    Easy. We all know exactly what's going to happen when one of the simulations shows something interesting. It'll be snapped up and patented as soon as the data block hits their servers. You? You'll get a micropayment. If you're lucky, they'll mention your name. If you're the first one ever to find something useful, you'll get publicity shots. Royalties from the patent? Yeah, right. You run these screen savers and all you're doing is helping a greedy bastard get rich. (Yes, I'm sure there are some ethical and altruistic biomedical profiteers out there, but my observation is that they're mostly just bastards.)

    The IP rush in biomedicine right now is scaring me. The prevailing regulatory attitude seems to be that life in general is just another resource to be locked up and exploited. I don't care how much they're paying per FLOP, I refuse to speed that process along.

  • What they really need.. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What they really need is to install something like this into TiVo. Consider the computing power you could get if 80% of the VCR's in the world supported distributed computing.

  • Popular Power supports Linux (Score:5)

    by Nelson Minar ( 7732 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @03:58PM (#869241) Homepage

    I'm the CTO of Popular Power [popularpower.com]. Good discussion here, thanks! I really think this technology is neat; we can turn the Internet into a very powerful resource and then use that resource to solve important problems. Our current influenza work is contributing to research that could save millions of lives.

    One poster here wondered how good this kind of distributed computer would be at biotech apps. Depends a lot on the algorithm, but for things that trivially parallelize (like random search algorithms, Monte Carlo simulations) it's a perfect match.

    Popular Power has been up and running since April. We've had a Linux client [popularpower.com] out for a couple of months now; download it and try it out!

  • Hrm (Score:2)

    by LNO ( 180595 )
    If only those Seti@home PCI cards weren't hoaxes - I could pop one of 'em into my machine and start raking in the Nobel prizes for this.

    Sigh. Guess I'll have to keep looking for my parents with the Arecibo radio telescope.

  • Not to mention that there is still no particularly valid scientific reason to presume that global warming even exists. Or maybe, the idea is simply that the project will generate tons of greenbar printouts that can be used to "conclusively document" the terrible global threat we face.

    Seriously, global warming is taken as gospel truth in so many places, but it's really quite likely that it does not exist and isn't happening - remember the same experts warning of global warming now warned of catastrophic mini-ice ages at the first earth day in 1970. They're no more likely right now than they were then, but they're just as ideologically driven as ever.

    Take a good look at this primer on global warming [heartland.org] (pay particular attention to the "seven things you should know about global warming" and globalwarming.org [globalwarming.org] for more information. Then do your own more detailed research.

    This is a complex issue and the evidence is not yet conclusive either way. In general, though, I am more convinced that this is a political ploy for control "to save the earth" than any sort of real phenomenon. The data I've looked at leave it quite unclear that there is any global warming trend at all - in particular, the satellite data, which is generally recognized as the most accurate, shows a slight cooling trend over the past 18 years. Even if a slight warming trend does exist, there is certainly no reason for alarm, as it is almost certainly a natural phenomenon. (As always, the chief human failing of hubris causes us to overestimate our importance and impact on the world around us - the fact is, we don't really make much difference.) The earth is not static, and it is not reasonable to expect it to be.
  • Most of these things are Windows only deals for a couple reasons.

    They have to display ads, so they have to use graphics calls that would be nontrivial to port to Linux. A distributed computing client doesn't need anything less portable than BSD networking system calls, which I'm told Winsock is a pretty close clone of.

    There's a big incentive for the user to get rid of the annoying ads, which on Linux could be as simple as starting the advertisement program set to display to a null X server (or a minimized Xnest, if like me you don't have a null server installed), or onto a different window manager desktop, etc. However a research program, nice level 20, who's going to want to hack around that?

    Not all researchers use Unix, but it's got to be a hell of a lot more popular than it is among advertisers.
  • Actually, most of your "most scientists" aren't even qualified to render an opinion on the issue!

    The various entities backing the global warming scare have done a great job of attracting numerous "scientists" to weigh in on the issue, but most of them are speaking well outside their area of expertise.

    A quick look at the facts about the thoughts of scientists on this issue:

    • Over 17,000 scientists have signed the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine petition which states in part "there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."
    • Of this 17,000+, over 2,100 are physicists, geophysicsts, climatologists, meteorologists, and environmental scientists who are especially well-qualified to evaluate the effects of CO2 on the Earth's atmosphere. Another 4,400 signers are scientists qualified to comment on CO2's effects on plant and animal life.
    • A competing petition urging "immediate action" to counter global warming was signed by only 2,600 scientists, over 90% of whom lacked the credentials to speak with authority on the issue. Only one of this entire 2600 was a climatologist!
    • Over one hundred climate scientists signed the 1996 Leipzig Declaration, which stated in part, "there does not exist today a general scientific consensus about the importance of greenhouse warming from rising levels of carbon dioxide. On the contrary, most scientists now accept the fact that actual observations from earth satellites show no climate warming whatsoever."
    • A survey of 36 state climatologists found that 58 percent disagreed with the statement, "global warming is for real," while only 36 percent agreed. A remarkable 89 percent agreed that "current science is unable to isolate and measure variations in global temperatures caused only by man-made factors."


    Source: http://www.heartland.org/studies/ieguide.htm#1 (includes references to their sources, too)

  • With seti@home, if there were a mistake or a mixup, the worst that can happen is that we think there are LGM (Little Green Men) someplace where they are not (false positive), or to miss out on finding them where they actually are (false negative). Disappointing? Yes, that's for sure.

    Now compare that to programs which would be used, for example, to test new drug therapies. Incorrect results, be they false positives or negatives could have potentially life-threatening consequences. So far, the risks here are basically the same as if they had run all the simulations on the company's own machines.

    What gets me really nervous would be to think of the impact if someone hacked the downloaded code, and intentionally returned incorrect results. For example, Peter's Perfect Pills is looking to test a new drug. Signs up with this @home service to do its computations inexpensively. But, Bluto's Big Bad Bromides has a competing drug and doesn't want to lose market share. So, they offer up a bunch of THEIR computers to the service, and intentionally return incorrect results. As soon as some of the data is compromised, all data would be suspect.

    Sure, they could just encrypt everything, but then the code would be inscrutable, and the virus writers could have a field day getting their programs transmitted around the world. If they send the source, instead, so I can be SURE there's no risk to MY system, then I have the tools in my hands to present a danger to THEIR results.

    That said, I sure hope I'm wrong about this. Can we meet the needs for authenticity, security, and safety to all parties' systems AND to the accuracy of the processing's results? (Or has somebody already solved this problem? If so, I'd love to see a link or a reference.)

  • Re:No. (Score:2)

    by Alik ( 81811 )
    Fine. Let's address the flamage.

    1) Not buying antibiotics. Spurious argument. Antibiotics took work to design. I have no problem with somebody profiting from hard work. I have no objections to the application of some kind of IP protection to the distributed client itself. Let them make their money by licensing the code. Then let the pharmcorps run a copy on every workstation in their offices. That'll get them plenty of computing power, the person who writes the simulation code gets rich, the companies find new drugs, and everyone "wins".

    2) The bit about "helping the dying boy" is sarcasm. My point is that it's not the patients who really benefit from this at all, it's the corporations. (BTW, let's say they find two cures for cancer. One is permanent, and one requires a pill a day for the rest of your life. Which do you think will be manufactured? Which one do you think will be patented but never developed (or permitted to be developed by any other firm for as long as the patent holds)? Given that some people are psychologically incapable of taking a pill a day and will therefore die preventable deaths, is this ethical?)

    3) And why shouldn't I get credit, or a share of the profits? If I devote my personal resources to a project and end up contributing something of massive value, why is it unfair to expect a massive return? It's not like the company will go bankrupt if they offer a small percentage, and even a small percentage of a major drug's sales is a huge sum of money (for most of us).

    These companies aren't in it for the good of humanity, y'know. Many may dislike Jon Katz, but he's got one good point: ethical behavior is often directly opposed to profitable behavior, and a corporation will choose the profitable 99% of the time. If your cycles discover something that would promote health but not be sufficiently profitable to manufacture, it's going into the file cabinet, not the marketplace.
  • So let me get this straight, you'd rather waste cycles than do something that at least will help a few dying children? Even though you seem resigned to the fact that only one of these "biomedical profiteers" have the means to accomplish this? Even though you're not risking anything other than a few nearly worthless CPU cyles, you expect them to split the payment down the middle?

    As a medical student, perhaps you'd like to tell me just how many key devices and medicines have been developed without the involvement of these "biomedical profiteers"? Now how many with? I thought so. Look, I'm not saying the world is always fair. I'm not saying everyone in the field is ethical (though I do personally know some very principled people in it). I'm not even saying this particular project is worthwhile, but I'd rather produce positive results for humanity in my lifetime than cling to some utopian notions in my dreams.

  • These guys need to obfuscate (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @06:51PM (#869260)
    Jeez, for something that is supposed to be a distributed system, it sure isn't secure. The data being processed (from popularpower.com) or at least the code for it is stored in a jar file in either a /temp folder or a /tmp folder (depending on win32 or linux install). They are all java .class files in several packages, NONE of which is obfuscated in the least.

    Some of the class names:
    immune.AntiBody
    immune.BCell
    immune.Simulator

    many others

    they all reversed nicely.

    Some of the code is pretty cool, I just wouldn't expect very accurate responses when the kiddies get ahold of it.

  • Global Warming Solution? (Score:3)

    by maelstrom ( 638 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @04:11PM (#869261) Homepage Journal
    "should us plebs look towards more honourable projects, such as trying to help research into the global warming"

    Sure, run all your computers 24/7 at 100% use to help solve Global Warming. Makes sense to me.

  • Fraud... (Score:3)

    by Mr.Ned ( 79679 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @04:16PM (#869265)
    This is a great idea, but how secure is it going to be? I remember hearing about empty packets being sent back to both distributed.net and seti@home. If people are being paid for this, there is all the more reason to be worried about this - look at the fraud with AllAdvantage (don't use linux and doubt it's avalible for the platform 'cept through WINE - for those out of the know, many people have anti-idlers so they keep on racking up the cash overnight and not looking at the banners).

    And this isn't just a relatively meaningless deal like distributed.net/seti - honestly, when compared to people's lives, how much does that matter?

    Anyone have any comments?
  • That is a very stupid argument that global warming is a myth, unfortuately this is the level of science a lot of people use to make complex decisions on the direction of science policy in the US (and likely other countries as well).

    There are reasons to think global warming is going to be a problem, however direct evidence or even accurate models are hard to come by because of the difficulty of dealing with a problem as complex as planetary scale climate modelling.

    The question is at what point are the future costs which may occur due to global warming outweigh the advantages of using cheap fossil fuels, and how good are our predictive models which we are relying on to attempt to make this decision.

    Right now our models aren't great and we are trying to examine what the effects will be at a substantially distant point in the future. These things combine to make it hard to convince the average person that this is something important to think about.

    There was a very good Frontline/Nova report on this issue a few months ago which explained the problem in detail, and showed the rather convincing evidence seen. Also it was interesting to see the extremist points of view;
    big oil: no problem what's all the fuss about
    enviromentalist: no power generation except solar and wind

    The energy production of solar and wind generation are currently, and as far as can be predicted in the future, not efficeint enough to produce our energy need in a reasonable amount of space (and land in expensive), the density is simply too low.

    They also explained why nuclear fission isn't a cure all because the fuel supply is too limited.

    The conclusion was that global warming if it occurs as predicted will force a reduction in fossil fuel usage within the next century, where if global warming were not an issue these fuels would be substantially gone in 2 or so centuries. Thus the global warming issues move the date when we need to have other means to supply our energy needs up by a century.

    Only a new technology which avoids these problems will prevent this crisis from occuring. One example is fusion energy production, unfortunately this has been 40 years away for about 50 years. Maybe nano technology will solve this problem after all its only 40 years away ;).
  • Sorry, but wind power is one of the most ecologically atrocious power sources known, and is very strongly opposed by the Sierra Club (which calls windpower windmills the "Cuisinarts of the air") and the Audubon Society among others.

    Fact: A 1992 study commissioned by the CEC (California Energy Commision) "conservatively" estimated that 39 golden eagles were being killed at Altamont Pass each year, a significant figure given a total population of 500 breeding pairs. On a percentage basis, the mortality rate per year at Altamont Pass under the estimate is eight times greater than the bald eagle kill from the Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound in 1989, and it recurs every year.

    It isn't some big government conspiracy that keeps alternative energy sources from flourishing, but simply that their efficiency and "greenness" isn't nearly what their promoters would have you believe.

    There are substantial ecological drawbacks to many alternative/"renewable" energy schemes, including wind, hydroelectric, solar, biomass, geothermal, and even conservation-based "negawatss". These drawbacks are often completely ignored by the proponents of these schemes, who usually stand to make a good pile of money themselves if they can get the government to fund their "green" proposal - such funding is required because none of these options can currently stnad on its own merit economically.

    Again, this is a complex issue, but for a great review of the ecological dangers of wind in particualr and some others as well, read the very thorough Cato report Renewable Energy - Not Cheap, Not "Green" [cato.org] (Source of the fact quoted above, includes thier source for the information.)

    If you're worried about Cato's rightward tilt, notice the number of environmentalist sources they use to make their argument, including a 1995 expose in SF Weekly.

    The birds thank you!

  • Heh (Score:2)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 )
    I'll sell my CPU cycles to whoever pays me the most.

    Bring on the competition!

  • Here's an analogy. A school builds a gym. Gyms are expensive - many people that want one don't have one. Outside of "school hours" (class times plus sporting events plus a bit of padding) the gym is empty. The school therefore will rent out the gym by the hour to any group that wants to use it when it would otherwise be idle. Everyone wins because limited resources are being used more efficently.

    Now, look at CPU time the same way. A company buys a batch of computers. CPU time is expensive - many people don't have enough. Outside of business hours the computers are idle (during business hours they're not always at 100% load either). The company needs a way to recover CPU time that would otherwise be lost. Run a program like this one and resources are fully untilised even during off-peak times. Everyone wins because limited resources are being used more efficently.

    Broadly these projects (S@h, D.net, et al) aren't new and innovative in and of themselves - they're inevitable, including commercial ones. The innovative bit is in getting them to actually work.

    This does, however, bring up an interesting point. When a computer is off, it's time is being wasted, but when it's on it's drawing power. (This is true to a lesser extent with CPU load too.) The cost of participating in these projects is not zero. The micropayments would have to at least offset the increase in power bill.

  • Nothing has hit us for about 60 million years,

    Actually, odds are good that we'll have visible meteors while I'm writing this message. But that's just a pretty light in the sky, right?

    We had a larger meteor hit the atmosphere in 1990, exploding with the force of 10 kilotons of TNT. No damage was done over the central Pacific, but a hit over a populated area or over a trigger-happy nuclear power might be a different story. But you're probably only concerned with land impacts.

    Fragments of a 100 kiloton energy 1947 impact actually reached earth near Vladivostok, leaving over a hundred craters. If it had hit populated land, life would have sucked, but it's still not a "city-killer".

    And the Tunguska impact, wacky black hole theories to the contrary, was most likely an impact by a comet fragment volatile enough to burn up in the atmosphere, but large enough (40-100 m) to cause the 20 megaton explosion that leveled thousands of kilometers of forest, killed unlucky wildlife, and broke windows over 100 kilometers away. This is a "city-killer" projectile, and we think there's about a 1/1000 chance that one will hit land in a given year.

    Not as flashy as the "asteroid the size of Texas" bullshit that sells movie tickets, but it does have the potential to cause a couple million deaths, which isn't small change.

    But are we doing anything about it? We may be tracking more than 10% (and there's a confidence-inspiring figure!) of kilometer-diameter Earth-crossing objects, but I don't know what kind of tracking if any occurs around the 100 meter size range.

    and it's debatable that it even happened then!

    Look at a freaking astronomy book sometime! Ever notice that every single airless body has craters hundreds of miles wide? Ever wonder what that kind of impact would do to an ecosystem? Did you even see any pictures of the Shoemaker-Levy impact last decade? Do fireballs larger than Earth ring a bell?

    And the dinosaur-killer impact was just the one that gets media attention. We've had mass extinctions every 100 million years or so; approximately the same frequency with which we'd expect 10 kilometer asteroids to strike Earth.

    That's not a coincidence.

    SHUT THE FUCK UP.

    Where the hell is this hostility coming from? The original poster said nothing that you could possibly take offense at. Have so many people in the real world expressed disgust at your ignorance that you have to take out repressed anger anonymously on the internet?
  • I have always wondered how these so called greenhouse gases such as Freon12 which is heavier than air, somehow manages to float up into the ozone

    Convection. At least in the troposphere (lower atmosphere). In fact, the gas mixture in the atmosphere is not segregated by "weight" at all.... Back in the 19th century is was popular to postulate that space travel was impossible because, by the logic of lighter gasses rising, the entire upper atmosphere would be comprised of hydrogen, and any attempt to send a rocket through the statosphere would cause the atmosphere to explode. Glad we got over that myth...

    The earth has been heating and cooling down naturally for millions of years.

    Yes, but at a much more gradual rate. The slow rate of natural change allows ecosystems the opportunity to change or migrate. If the temperature rises 3 degrees over several generations of spruce trees, forests of those trees have the opportunity to migrate northward or upward. If it happens in only 100 years, those trees dry up, burn down or get eaten by bud worm. The tides are natural cycles too, but that doesn't mean I'm happy about tsunamis!

  • Hah! (Score:2)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 )
    Wheras now they patent the drug, get the monopoly on it for the next nearly two decades (Or is it 5 years for drugs? I think I heard something about that somewhere,) and you get some elderly people unable to afford the drug. And I doubt the drug company would be inclined to pay you for anything more than the CPU cycles you used on their behalf and I doubt it'll be nearly as much as they were worth by the time the drug ends its profit cycle.

    Drug companies are only in it for the money, just like everyone else.

    Christ... am I cynical or what?

  • My fave is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Basically a committee of international climatologists, atmospheric scientists, meteorologists and chemists meeting under the auspices of the UN. They are here [www.ipcc.ch].

    In the matter of shoes I deffer to the cobbler. These guys are the cobblers.

  • The point wouldn't be to match CPU cycles to dollars. The point is for underfunded groups to get data processed quickly.
    It would be FAR FAR FAR cheaper to hand the algorithms to the @home group, and let them give you the answer a reasonable time later. In addition, the @home group does not have to pay for the super computers required to do the work.
    In the end, the bulk of the hardware cost is eaten up by the public. You'd find that it is far cheaper to set up a couple of modems in a bank than it is to buy a fast computer, much less each node in a 2048 chip computer.


    "Blue Elf has destroyed the food!"

  • Similar Product. (Score:3)

    by 11oh8 ( 115104 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @03:09PM (#869307) Homepage
    Last year, I group of us at school (U of Michigan) did a project to do generic distributed computing... We didn't do anything with the project after the semester but maybe it could be revived now... It's basically a client-server system to apply distributed computing to different tasks..... the URL for the project homepage is here [umich.edu]
  • Cool idea, but talk about technology moving too fast for IP rights:

    • What happens when a patent is applied for based on the distributed calculations?
    • What are the implications of your grandma's PC mapping part of the human genome?
    • Why yet another security hole in my box?

    But for the cool factor, let's all beat a path to those download sites...

  • $$$ (Score:3)

    by SwiftBob ( 141901 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @03:14PM (#869312)
    Here's how it works:

    1.)2 hours of cpu time : 4 cents.
    2.)1 block of data : 25 cents.
    3.)1 Cured Disease: 100,000,000 Dollars.

    Ok, Count me in.
    -Swift ::
  • Is it just me, or does it seem like complex biochemical simulations might not be quite so efficient for this kind of loose, massively-parallel processing? With, say, the SETI data, is makes sense, since there are relatively few operations to be performed on a given data set. To model the action of drugs on cancer cells or the influenza virus, though, you'd either need complete simulations running on each node, or a lot of interaction between them.

    I'm not a biochemist, so I can't say for sure, but it seems to me like running a complete sim of that type in a screensaver is a bit, shall we say, ambitious? That leaves parting them out, which is exactly the kind of process that clusters are poor at. If every atom in the simulation is bouncing off of an atom that 'lives' on another user's machine, modem-speed latencies will kill the whole thing.

  • Priorities (Score:3)

    by Elvis Maximus ( 193433 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @03:15PM (#869315) Homepage

    In a recent discussion in this space about SETI@home, one of the threads was something along the lines of:

    How can we spend so much time and so many resources on this when we have so many problems here on Earth?

    To which an astute poster replied something like:

    What resources? Extra computing cycles? When they find a way to feed people or cure cancer with extra computing cycles, that will be a valid argument.

    Uh-oh.

    So do we now all have a moral obligation to dump SETI@home?

    -

  • "..the huge success of the Seti.." Have they actually found any alien intelligence?

  • Re:Vindictive Attitude. (Score:3)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @08:27PM (#869318) Journal

    This is the subject of much debate in the press, and unfortunately there is way too much politics for anybody to really be informed either way. Just when you think you've found an objective study, there is usually a money trail leading someplace, and the leftists are no less guilty of this than the rightists.

    Your argument is similar to the left wing argument. The counterargument is that without profit motive the drug won't be developed to begin with.

    The counter-counter argument to that is that we are placing economics above public health. The counter-counter-counter argument to that is that economics *is* public health; i.e. a world where researchers at Pfizer have to live paycheck-to-paycheck is actually less healthier (at least for those researchers).

    In the final analysis, we need some way to determine the proper balance, or "equilibrium" between the profit motive of the drug company and the profit motive of the drug company customers.

    Under an the extreme left approach, socialization results in a decreased ability for the company to deliver a drug. Under an extreme right approach, economic circumstances prohibit the lower classes from receiving the drug.

    Now, the trick is to determine the situation that maximizes delivery of the drug, which lies somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.

    There is nothing particularly honourable about giving drugs away if you can only do it for a little while, just so you can go bankrupt and/or cut research staff. It is far more honourable to maximize delivery. So far, the limited life drug patent is the best method we have come up with to do this.

  • Well, my ignorance is bigger so my question would not be "How accurate is it?" but "How does it do that kind of simulation?". I've been looking at the Popular Power website and their explanation of the influenza project is too brief. I think that a lot of people would like to know what is it that their machines are running. This may not be possible in commercial projects but this one is non-profit, so, guys at Popular Power, how about some additional info and/or links about how the simulation is performed, what kind of algorithm is used, how does this fit in the whole search fot the yearly vaccinations, how doctors use the info my machine produces, etcetera? Take example fromn distributed.net, they give plenty of additional references to consult.

  • Oops, here's a link to some info on that Nova/Frontline report [pbs.org]
  • Solution:

    1. Buy a G3 or (eventually) crusoe. Significantly more efficient than those nasty pentiums (pentii?)
    2. Sign up for your local utilities optional windpower program. [enmax.com]
    3. Your local utility doesn't offer wind or solar? Well, replace step two with "harass your local utility till they give you the choice to get pinwheel power".

    There. You're set.

  • Look, big medical companies have deep pockets.

    If they wanted a 10,000 node beowolf cluster of desktop PCs, they would buy it. (and get use out of the machines 24/7)

    These screensavers are great for groups like SETI that may not have quite the same resources, but this isn't likely going to become a breakthrough in medical research.

    cot
  • Well, IMHO, no.

    As you stated later in the comment, picking screensavers may one day be like picking charities. You're giving something away, even if in this case it's an intangible. That said, it's an act of giving, not one of selling.

    While a winning 'reward' might be an incentive to join, I don't see a financial 'lure' as being positive, since it may lead to people attempting to process blocks faster, possibly at the expense of correctness of data.

    That said, people who give away their free cycles probably are due something. Currently, most distributed projects are non-profit in any case, so the point may be moot, but what about having a commercial company that relied on a distributed approach for one of their products donate a percentage of profits resulting from said computations to the charity of their choice? (or better yet, other non-profit distributed projects)?

    I could see that as being fairer than a 'lottery', or no feedback into the system at all.

  • Re:seti@home ISP (Score:3)

    by baka_boy ( 171146 ) <<lennon> <at> <day-reynolds.com>> on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @03:21PM (#869335) Homepage
    Better yet, they offer DSL, and throttle your bandwidth based on the amount of data you process per month. Build a home cluster, run their software, and they'll connect you at T-1 speeds for free... Anybody wanna start looking for some VC?
  • But if there were things to choose from, people who want one specific advancement can choose from a selection.

    This could be very good and very cool.

    Think about it. Many people who choose SETI@Home over Distributed.net aren't just choosing it due to the visuals, but because they want to find aliens. I, myself, would love to find aliens. But I think there would be a greater chance of, say, curing cancer.

    I'd love to be able to setup my computer to:
    - Search for prime numbers for one week
    - Help find a cure for cancer the second
    - Help find aliens the third
    - etc

    Or one could just choose to dedicate all of their cycles to one thing that they really want to see happen.

  • Cool business plan, but... (Score:3)

    by StevenMaurer ( 115071 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @03:24PM (#869337) Homepage

    The idea is cool obviously, but frought with ethical dilemmas.

    Does the company owe the person whose computer discovered the drug anything? If so, someone is eventually going to win a computational lottery. If not (at least in U.S. versions of this) you could easily get some eldery person unable to afford the very drug their computer researched.

    I can easily see the day when picking your screen saver will be almost as challenging as picking the charities you choose to support.

  • let me explain :)

    And why shouldn't I get credit, or a share of the profits? If I devote my personal resources to a project and end up contributing something of massive value, why is it unfair to expect a massive return? It's not like the company will go bankrupt if they offer a small percentage, and even a small percentage of a major drug's sales is a huge sum of money (for most of us).

    The point is you haven't contributed something of massive value. Your computer is only one unit of a massive number cruncher. If your computer didn't do the work, the packet would be sent to the next computer in the line and they would crack the final code. That's not a massive contribution - it's nothing.

    Let me put it this way. Say I own a theme park and to break even I need 1000 visitors to go through the turnstiles. When Visitor 1000 walks through my gates, I will have broken even and paid for my theme park. That is a significant visitor that has stepped through - it marks a momentous occassion - but did that visitor contribute anything? No way! If Visitor 1000 had died just before they paid for their entry ticket, I wouldn't give two hoots about it. Visitor 1001 would be the one to make be break even.

    For the same reason, your 'effort' in helping to find the cure for cancer is no more important than Visitor 1000 - that is, not important at all.

  • I have to wonder, wouldn't it be possible for people to mess with the results, thus returning false positives and false negatives? How would such a thing be checked for? Would there be random double-checking so that if one person screwed up, the project wouldn't suffer?

  • Re:No. (Score:3)

    by Jonathan ( 5011 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @05:27PM (#869351) Homepage
    We all know exactly what's going to happen when one of the simulations shows something interesting. It'll be snapped up and patented as soon as the data block hits their servers. You? You'll get a micropayment. If you're lucky, they'll mention your name. If you're the first one ever to find something useful, you'll get publicity shots. Royalties from the patent? Yeah, right. You run these screen savers and all you're doing is helping a greedy bastard get rich.

    Yeah, right, like you would actually deserve fame and fortune for the extremely challenging task of running a program. It only seems fair that the creators of the program would get that, no?

    (Yes, I'm sure there are some ethical and altruistic biomedical profiteers out there, but my observation is that they're mostly just bastards.)

    Tell you what -- next time you get some sort of infection, don't support one of these greedy profiteers by buying antibiotics. No, die a painful and gruesome death, and by doing so, send a strong message to these bastards.

  • I don't think the nature of research is being questioned, but rather the way in which for-profit organisations are hoping to cash in on the distributed computing buzz without compensation for individuals who are donating their resources.

    The model a lot of these companies are relying on is: you supply CPU for free because you're enthusiastic about the end result, and then spend your life savings on the cancer drugs the research lab developed and patented with your CPU time.


    --
    My name is Sue,
    How do you do?
    Now you gonna die!

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