WCG Team Millennium Falcon – Newsletter #1!

Together we can have the fastest hunks of junk in the galaxy! Click here to join: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/team/viewTeamInfo.do?teamId=91PX550LR12

Hello crewmates! I thought I’d get things going by sending out newsletters now and then to say thanks and get you up to speed on the latest happenings around World Community Grid.

First thanks to Mike and Sharina for joining! Mike works at Boeing with me and we’ve done a lot of flight testing together. Sharina is a sailing buddy of mine and close friend from King County Search & Rescue.

We number 3 members now and it would be great to recruit some more friends and family. Mention us to friends and coworkers. There’s a lot of crunching to be done!

Despite our low member numbers, we’ve come a long ways inour first month. We ranked higher than 20,000 in total CPU computing time compared to other teams and have worked that down to #11,507 as of tonight. We have recently passed 1 year of total CPU time for our team and have processed over 11,000 work units! I’ve entered us into a few short term challenges and we’ve fared well, around the upper 1/3rd of participating teams. Details are on the team’s stats page towards the bottom.

There has been a lot of positive feedback recently from project scientists. You can read up by clicking the links in the “notices” tab of your BOINC client. From the medical projects, I’m hearing that synthetic molecules produces as a direct result of our crunching has had up to a 70% success rate of disabling disease related proteins. Many of the current projects plan to release papers after peer review. The research forums have a lot of good info if you’re curious.

The Help Cure Cancer project (HCC) has had a tremendous boost by recently adding graphical processing units (GPU’s) to assist in the crunching. I have 3 GPU’s in work crunching for HCC. This has dramatically increased work output and the project is anticipated to be wrapped up in about 70 days. The Help Fight Childhood Cancer (HFCC) project was recently extended by adding an 11th protein target and now has around 112 days of work left for us. Jump on both if you want to earn a project badge.

Project badges are earned starting on the 14th day of individual computing time spent on any single project. As you progress up to a maximum of 2 years, the color of the badges changes. There is no fortune here, only glory, so badges are bragging rights. All of your badges are posted when you comment in the forums and are also visible on your stats page. Here are the colors:

Bronze - 14 days
Silver - 45 days
Gold - 90 days
Ruby - 180 days
Emerald - 1 year
Sapphire - 2 years

Here is a good link to show status and work remaining in calendar days for all active projects.

http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q210/Sekerob/WCGYearsPi1Project.png

The WCG staff reports a lot of happenings are in the works including new projects and the addition of GPU crunching ability to current projects. It’s a fun time to assist cutting edge science!

Keep crunching!

- Captain Paul, Millennium Falcon