What is the BOINC client and how it works?

The name of the program comes from Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. The BOINC client and BOINC server (which manages each of the projects and is deployed and managed by project administrators) were developed in University of California, Berkeley, one of the top world universities. The purpose of BOINC client is to download scientific software (applications) and their tasks on your PC, run them, get results, validate and calculate your credits. You can see detailed statistics on tasks, which are/were computed on your PC. The software applications are provided by projects administrators. In our case these are two applications – GROMACS and Autodock. GROMACS software is required for protein structure modeling and for studies of proteins complexes with potential drugs. You can find more information about BOINC and distributed computing in our FAQ page.

What is all of this about?

This web site is about drug discovery and distributed volunteer computing. DrugDiscovery@home gives the opportunity for volunteers worldwide to help development of new medicines. Our priority fields of research are cancer, age-related diseases, antibiotics and anti-virals.

The goal of DrugDiscovery@home is to provide much cheaper drugs and bring them faster to clinical trials and then to patients. You can find more about scientific background of the research on our Science page.

What is volunteer distributed computing?

The time between clicks of the mouse or even between typing is much more than just the time, when you actively work on a computer, laptop, tablet or smartphone. So, most of the time the resources of your PC are used by idle system tasks less than 5%. If you don't want to waste that time, you can participate in distributed computing and help solving problems, important to humanity. Volunteer computing uses the power of personal computers, distributed globally. It can result in computational power, similar to parallel processing on clusters and supercomputers and can thus solve serious scientific problems, which require a lot of computational time.

Why do people participate in volunteer computing?

Most of the time personal computing devices are not used. This spare time can be used for making something important for the science and benefits of the world. This opens a door to the volunteer computing community, which is already very broad and includes several millions people worldwide. Charity is one of several motivating reasons. All volunteers get so called credits - virtual units, which correspond to how much of computational time was donated to the projects. These credits stimulate user-user competitions and also competitions between teams of users and even the whole countries. However, in contrast to most of the projects, we suggest users to exchange their BOINC credits to digital currencies, which they can then transfer to each other.

I am interested, how can I join?

In order to join the project you need to download BOINC software from here: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/download_all.php

However, the server is not active now. We are looking for Linux server admin.

Please write to us to av@digitalbiopharm.com
Or call +79259361160 if you have such skills.

What are the teams?

The teams in our project work in the same way as teams work everywhere - people united for some purpose, in our case for the purpose of number crunching. The purpose of team is generally to generate as much credits as possible, using hardware of its participants. Teams can have a web site, socializing activities, you can find friends there and…whatever, all teams have different structure and rules.

Can you describe more the strategy and methods of Drugdiscovery@home?

The purpose of Drugdiscovery@home project is to develop and use the recent in silico methods drug discovery process in the fields of stem cells, aging and cancer. We are using methods, which model new molecules, which should become safe and effective drugs. Further we plan to test these compounds in academic and industrial organizations. Our current goal is to validate the methods, get first positive results, publish report as scientific papers and then start more broad involvement of the project into making new biomedical technologies. You can find more detailed description of the methods in the presentation above.