Rechenkraft.net – From Volunteers to Scientists

Citizen Cyberlab Summit, Geneva/Switzerland, Sept. 17th 2015

Dr. Michael H.W. Weber

President, Rechenkraft.net e.V.

Guest Scientist, Botanical Garden of Philipps-University of Marburg / Germany

Early 2001: Initial website with a forum & wiki…

…presenting a complete collection of all available distributed computing projects with detailed descriptions.

...but what is distributed computing?

Software – Clients

Software – Statistics & Monitor Programs

Rechenkraft.net – Party 2002 & 2003

...in silico Monsters

...you could say: initially it was a bit like being part of some sort of

ELECTRONIC SPORTS LEAGUE competition which exists mainly in order to enable underfunded

science projects.

...but then we realized that, for various reasons, a lot of scientists

were not able to put their computational project idea into

practice, even if they had the funds – and that was the birth of

YOYO@HOME:

Yoyo@home…

…an umbrella project allowing us to incorporate anybody‘s scientific applications in BOINC. For free.

Presentations at Exhibitions & Conferences

• Geiger-Müller counter plus „Uranglas“ • Quake Catcher Network sensor • diverse ARM development boards • beamer showing screen savers from DC projects

Among many activities, participating in an HIV-combating project as official partner of the World AIDS day organizers in 2013 once again got us some local press coverage…

…ultimately leading to the offering of space in one of our town‘s buildings:

[hsmr], the Hackspace Marburg was born…

With space and tools at hand… a lot of things become possible…

A universal multi-formfactor mainboard cluster rack…

…accomodates ATX, µATX, Mini-ITX Mainboards plus GPUs and also embedded ARM systems such as the NVIDIA Jetson Tegra K1 or Hardkernel‘s ODROIDs.

Using our computer network knowledge…

…within a few days, we were able to setup free WLAN in the local refugee camp.

Up-to-date ARM development hardware…

…is available in our Hackspace and can be accessed via SSH – just contact us in case you need access for client develoment.

• NVIDIA Jetson Tegra K1 (ARM Cortex-A15, NVIDIA Kepler GPU, 192 CUDA cores) • ODROID-X2/U2/U3/XU/XU3/XU4

...but wait a minute – if we can turn other people’s scientific ideas

into BOINC projects, then why don’t we setup a project entirely

of our own?

Well, that was the birth of RNA WORLD:

RNA World…

…our first own project which is a bioinformatic platform to tackle open questions in RNA biology.

...wasn’t there some sort of glitch?

Well, some of the tasks turned out to run for a few months generating

results archives which, in compressed form, yielded files of 50 GB in size.

Once unpacked (which was a trouble on its own), we were lucky and got small files – but then again in the

ten’s of thousands!

...so we learned one thing or two about certain limitations of standard

operating systems.

Still a number of groundbreaking innovations were created as well...

...such as the first public job submission interfaces

available in distributed computing!

Setup of a Laboratory…

…to experimentally verify results generated by the RNA World project… but also to do other interesting things…

...e.g. finding a cure for the fireblight disease of some plants by means of natural bacteriophages...

...and the development of a

universal bacteriophage construction kit potentially applicable even for

human bacterial diseases in a synthetic biology approach that

involves microfluidics-based genome engineering!

In progress: Fireblight reporter – Online-Portal

• training module to recognize the symptoms • photos & GPS data of potential detection sites are uploaded • images of other participants are judged by community members • plant material becomes available • direct coupling of information to governmental agencies possible

In progress: Arnika Mapper – Online-Portal

• training module to recognize the plant • photos & GPS data of potential detection sites are uploaded • images of other participants are judged by community members • plant material for cultivation becomes available

...if on top of all this, some funding would be available...

BMBF Citizen Science Strategy 2020… …we helped to develop this program over a period of more than a year.

A few of our suggestions • funding should be accessible to layman • public Government- funded maker spaces in every larger city • citizen science

interface bureau in every university

Thank you – Any questions, please?