An introduction to the Distributed Computing project Microbiome Immunity Project from World Community Grid and my first badges

An introduction to the Distributed Computing project Microbiome Immunity Project from World Community Grid and my first badges

Hi everyone,

Today, I’m happy to announce I have acquired the Bronze and Silver badge for World Community Grid new project called Microbiome Immunity Project.

For those who knows me well, you know I’m a big fan of Distributed Computing projects, especially the ones that runs on the BOINC platform. I believe that computing power should be donated to projects that have worthwhile causes, so I know that the electricity I waste is done for a good purpose as my machines happily crunch 24/7, receiving, processing, and returning tasks to the project.

This time, World Community Grid lauched the Microbiome Immunity Project, addind that to the already available projects which as of this post are Smash Childhood Cancer, OpenZika, Help Stop TB, FightAIDS@Home – Phase 2, Outsmart Ebola Together, Mapping Cancer Markers, and FightAIDS@Home, all of which I’ve happily contributed donating my spare CPU power from all of my machines, including my phones and tablets (Yes, phones and tablets does help make the world a better place by contributing to these causes as well.)

The Microbiome Immunity Project is a project that aims to help scientists understand how bacterias play a role in our bodies and how they are responsible for different diseases like diabetes. Through our computations, we will enable Scientists to better understand all of this, by analizing different proteins and molecules from each bateria’s gene.

World Community Grid keeps on its mission to help solve medical and environmental issues by supporting these types of projects, but of course, the community plays a much bigger role by processing all of the project’s tasks.

So, given this introduction, I happily announce that I’ve received my Bronze badge, which was today upgraded to Silver, due to my contribution to this particular subproject of World Community Grid. The bronze badge looked like this: Microbiome Immunity Project - Bronze Badge while the Silver badge looks like this: Microbiome Immunity Project - Silver Badge.

The Bronze badge is awarded after 14 days of computing while the Silver badge is awarded after 45 days of computing. Note that in the BOINC computing world, a day is defined as one CPU thread doing research, so if my machine has 8 threads (A typical Intel i7 4c/8t CPU), that means that for each day of computing, I’m actually doing 8 CPU computing days.

Here’s the messages I received in the BOINC software regarding the badges:

Microbiome Immunity Project - Silver Badge BOINC notice

And here are my stats as of the time of this post:

Microbiome Immunity Project - Silver Badge in the WCG Stats

As you can see, I’ve contributed to a variety of subprojects from the World Community Grid project. The next badge for the Microbiome Immunity Project is the Gold badge, awarded after 90 days. You can see when a new award is given on this page by clicking here.

And now, some more stats from me:

Microbiome Immunity Project - Silver Badge Stats
Microbiome Immunity Project - Silver Badge Graphs

Oh, and did you know you can also earn rewards by performing this type of computation? That’s right! Check out Gridcoin, a cryptocurrency that rewards you for your BOINC computations. Visit their website at https://gridcoin.us.

BOINC = Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing is a distributed computing software and platform that allows you to participate in BOINC-enabled projects or set up a new distributed computing project by running their server software. Learn more about the BOINC software by clicking here!.

Learn more from World Community Grid by clicking here.
Learn more from the Microbiome Immunity Project by clicking here.

My main crunching machines uses the following processors: 2x Intel Xeon X5670 (24 threads total), AMD Ryzen 7 1700 (OC to 3.60Ghz, 16 threads total), Intel i7-4700MQ (8 threads), Intel i7-3610QM (8 threads), lots of Intel Atom Z3735 and from the X5 series, all of which are Quad-core CPUs, and ARM processors from the phones and tablets, normally quad-core.

Screenshot from the Dual Intel Xeon X5670 server:

Microbiome Immunity Project - BOINC Tasks

That’s all! Hope you enjoyed reading this article and learned about my continuing contribution toward this project!