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?
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