FightAIDS@Home Update; Next stage in Phase 2

in gridcoin •  6 years ago 

Preparing for next stage in FightAIDS@Home Phase 2

The World Community Grid project FightAIDS@Home released an update today, which describes their preparations for the next stage of Phase 2. Phase 1 is still running, while Phase 2 targets new approaches from its result.

Researchers on Phase 2 now plans to write a new paper and test new compounds, as part of their continued research for new and better treatments.

AIDS and HIV is once again in the watch scope of global eyes, as WHO 1, 2 and Medscape reports about multi-drug resistent HIV.

It's estimated that around 36 million people in the world lives with HIV, in 2016, and around 1 million people died of AIDS related deceases.

Read their press release on WCG.

People coming together as one on this Global Challenge

The problem with HIV is its ever mutating way to make drugs ineffective, requiring constant new drugs to combat the virus.

Phase 1, Launched in 2005, the project team identified thousands of potentially promising candidates for lab experiments in phase 1. Thanks to a large array of volunteering users donating their spare computer time to the project, they computed a staggering 353 958 years of computer time!

And they are still performing work on Phase 1 every day!

In Phase 2, launched in 2015, the project is performing experiments of the potential candidates from phase 1. As the experiments in labs are both time consuming and costly, it's impossible to do these tests in labs on the many thousands of candidates found.

This is where we are today, and the researcher will now continue with the next stage as reported.

Our team is processing the current type of work units through World Community Grid as quickly as possible. Once these work units are completed, we plan to write a paper about the process, including its strengths, limitations, and lessons learned.

We are also planning to use World Community Grid’s computing power to analyze new compounds that are important to our work with the HIVE Center at the Scripps Research Institute. This work will begin after we run a sample of these new compounds on our own grid computing network.

Sources

Join Gridcoin Research+BOINC and Change the World

BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, pronounced /bɔɪŋk/ – rhymes with "oink") is a distributed work platform that has been around since 2002 (15 years now) and rewards all participants with a score. BOINC consists of over 500,000+ active users and many more computers. It is a popular platform for researchers to do large amounts of distributed work. The infrastructure is already in place, and no payment is required. Doing distributed work is purely voluntary, where users can attach any project of their choosing.

Gridcoin Research is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) cryptocurrency that rewards Research computation based on the BOINC RAC (Recent Average Credit) score. Some requirements are for projects to be listed on the platform but are relatively easy to comply. There are currently ~20+ Projects included that the network rewards work done by users.


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Hello, I noticed in the WCG poster it says there are over 620,000 volunteers are all of these volunteers using BOINC or are some WCG projects BOINC independent. If they are all using BOINC, I think we should update the

BOINC consists of over 500,000+ active users and many more computers.

line. Also from this website: https://boincstats.com/en/stats/-1/user/list/
It says "Total number of users: 4,581,470" So maybe @jringo or @parejan who does the gridcoin stats can chime in to let us know if this 500,00+ should be updated?
cheers
ian

  ·  6 years ago (edited)

According to BOINCStats the number of overall active participants is currently 162,733. We did reach levels of 500,000+ active users but this was in 2016. Personally I think it would be possible to reach these levels again although the overall trend is moving downwards.

I wrote an article about active BOINC users which could be interesting to read: https://steemit.com/gridcoin/@parejan/boinc-active-user-trends

  ·  6 years ago (edited)

@parejan thanks for the reply and the link to your post. It was very interesting to see how active participants change over time. Although the trend of BOINC users seems to moving downwards it is encouraging to see in your chart 6 that Gridcoin users are on a upward trajectory!

https://steemit.com/gridcoin/@parejan/boinc-active-user-trends

The infographic also states at the bottom that the data reflects the WCG network as of May 2013. 5 years ago.

I'm sure there are more impressive numbers to be shown for 2018.

  ·  6 years ago (edited)

I can't confirm the IBM infographic other than taking BOINCStats again:

May.2013 - 405,982 users of which 72,522 active, generating a RAC output of 117M
May.2018 - 541,928 users of which 50,138 active, generating a RAC output of 134M

Taking these numbers a side, WCG has achieved a lot in the last 5 years and I believe this is what we should focus on!

For what it's worth, I took this info graphic not to wave with numbers of active users, but to display what they have accomplish together.

As you state, the numbers are from 2013. It doesn't state any numbers of active users.

My text regarding boinc about 500.000+ active users is from last year and may have changed.