Fighting Cancer In My Sleep
You may recall hearing about the SETI@Home volunteer computing project back in 1999.
The idea was to collect a metric fuckton of data from the Arecibo radio telescope, split the raw data into digestible chunks, then farm the chunks out to thousands of volunteers, letting their home computers sift through the data looking for potential signals from extraterrestrial sources.
WCG screen saver
The sifting software ran in a low-priority background task as a screen saver. When you weren’t using your computer, its spare cycles could be used to perform useful scientific research. And *your* laptop might detect the first signal from intelligent life outside our solar system!
As an engineer, I’ve always had both work and home machines, plus older computers lying around gathering dust, so I installed the software and started processing chunks of data (“work units” in their lingo).
After running that for several years, in 2004 I switched to a different volunteer computing project: United Devices’ grid.org Cancer Research Project, which tried to find useful matches between ligands and key proteins. By that time I was a committed Pan-Mass Challenge rider, and contributing to cancer research was more important to me than looking for aliens.
I ran the grid.org software for another three years before they shut it down. During that time I processed 4,500 work units, volunteering 5.25 years of CPU time. When it finished, I wrote up a blogpost about my experience.
Then I migrated over to IBM’s new World Community Grid, which hosted numerous volunteer computing projects. Eleven years later, it’s still running… and so are my laptop, our printer server, and even my Android tablet!
For WCG, I’ve volunteered 34 years worth of CPU time from 12 different computers. I’m in their top one percent of users, having processed 70,000 work units for 19 different research projects that focus on topics as diverse as AIDS, Zika, Ebola, Malaria, clean energy, clean water, and more productive rice crops.
But as you might expect, my most sizable and rewarding contribution has been toward defeating cancer. Between the grid.org and WCG platforms, I’ve contributed 34 CPU years to a half dozen cancer research projects.
With the recent rise in cloud computing, the idea of farming large computing tasks out to home computers seems antiquated. But as long as the work units keep coming, I’ll keep crunching them, doing whatever I can to further the cause of eradicating cancer… while I sleep!