The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of knowledge of physics. The society publishes more than a dozen scientific journals, including the prestigious Physical Review and Physical Review Letters, and organizes more than twenty science meetings each year. APS is a member society of the American Institute of Physics. Since January 2021 the organization has been led by chief executive officer Jonathan Bagger.
SETI@home is a project of the Berkeley SETI Research Center to analyze radio signals with the aim of searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Until March 2020, it was run as an Internet-based public volunteer computing project that employed the BOINC software platform. It is hosted by the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, and is one of many activities undertaken as part of the worldwide SETI effort.
The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing is an open-source middleware system for volunteer computing. Developed originally to support SETI@home, it became the platform for many other applications in areas as diverse as medicine, molecular biology, mathematics, linguistics, climatology, environmental science, and astrophysics, among others. The purpose of BOINC is to enable researchers to utilize processing resources of personal computers and other devices around the world.
Nicholas Constantine Metropolis was a Greek-American physicist.
Predictor@home was a volunteer computing project that used BOINC software to predict protein structure from protein sequence in the context of the 6th biannual CASP, or Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction. A major goal of the project was the testing and evaluating of new algorithms to predict both known and unknown protein structures.
World Community Grid (WCG) is an effort to create the world's largest volunteer computing platform to tackle scientific research that benefits humanity. Launched on November 16, 2004, with proprietary Grid MP client from United Devices and adding support for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) in 2005, World Community Grid eventually discontinued the Grid MP client and consolidated on the BOINC platform in 2008. In September 2021, it was announced that IBM transferred ownership to the Krembil Research Institute of University Health Network in Toronto, Ontario.
LHC@home is a volunteer computing project researching particle physics that uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform. The project's computing power is utilized by physicists at CERN in support of the Large Hadron Collider and other experimental particle accelerators.
Rosetta@home is a volunteer computing project researching protein structure prediction on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform, run by the Baker laboratory at the University of Washington. Rosetta@home aims to predict protein–protein docking and design new proteins with the help of about fifty-five thousand active volunteered computers processing at over 487,946 GigaFLOPS on average as of September 19, 2020. Foldit, a Rosetta@home videogame, aims to reach these goals with a crowdsourcing approach. Though much of the project is oriented toward basic research to improve the accuracy and robustness of proteomics methods, Rosetta@home also does applied research on malaria, Alzheimer's disease, and other pathologies.
QMC@Home was a volunteer computing project for the BOINC client aimed at further developing and testing Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) for use in quantum chemistry. It is hosted by the University of Münster with participation by the Cavendish Laboratory. QMC@Home allows volunteers from around the world to donate idle computer cycles to help calculate molecular geometry using Diffusion Monte Carlo.
Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which people donate their computers' unused resources to a research-oriented project, and sometimes in exchange for credit points. The fundamental idea behind it is that a modern desktop computer is sufficiently powerful to perform billions of operations a second, but for most users only between 10–15% of its capacity is used. Common tasks such as word processing or web browsing leave the computer mostly idle.
Ibercivis was a volunteer computing platform which allows internet users to participate in scientific research by donating unused computer cycles to run scientific simulations and other tasks. The original project, which became operational in 2008, was a scientific collaboration between the Portuguese and Spanish governments, but it is open to the general public and scientific community, both within and beyond the Iberian Peninsula. The project's name is a portmanteau of Iberia and the Latin word civis, meaning 'citizen'.
Leiden Classical was a volunteer computing project run by the Theoretical Chemistry Department of the Leiden Institute of Chemistry at Leiden University. Leiden Classical used the BOINC system, and enabled scientists or science students to submit their own test simulations of various molecules and atoms in a classical mechanics environment. ClassicalDynamics is a program completely written in C++. The library is covered by the LGPL license and the main program is covered by the GPL. The project shut down on June 5, 2018.
David Matthew Ceperley is a theoretical physicist in the physics department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign or UIUC. He is a world expert in the area of Quantum Monte Carlo computations, a method of calculation that is generally recognised to provide accurate quantitative results for many-body problems described by quantum mechanics.
David P. Landau is Distinguished Research Professor of Physics and founding Director of the Center for Simulational Physics at the University of Georgia. In 1967, he received his PhD at Yale University under the direction of Werner P. Wolf. Two years later, he moved to the University of Georgia. Although intending to continue experimental research, he instead initiated high quality Monte Carlo studies of phase transitions. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He won the Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics, the highest award in computational physics given by the American Physical Society. In 2016, he received the doctor honoris causa degree from the Federal University of Minas Gerais.
MilkyWay@home is a volunteer computing project in the astrophysics category, running on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform. Using spare computing power from over 38,000 computers run by over 27,000 active volunteers as of November 2011, the MilkyWay@home project aims to generate accurate three-dimensional dynamic models of stellar streams in the immediate vicinity of the Milky Way. With SETI@home and Einstein@home, it is the third computing project of this type that has the investigation of phenomena in interstellar space as its primary purpose. Its secondary objective is to develop and optimize algorithms for volunteer computing.
AQUA@home was a volunteer computing project operated by D-Wave Systems that ran on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) software platform. It ceased functioning in August 2011. Its goal was to predict the performance of superconducting adiabatic quantum computers on a variety of problems arising in fields ranging from materials science to machine learning. It designed and analyzed quantum computing algorithms, using Quantum Monte Carlo techniques.
Smash Childhood Cancer is a World Community Grid volunteer computing subproject on the BOINC platform. It is based on World Community Grid's Help Childhood Cancer subproject which was a joint effort of Chiba University and the Chiba Cancer Center. Based on the results of that project, the Smash Childhood Cancer started in January 2017 looking for drug candidates targeting additional childhood cancers.
eOn was a volunteer computing project running on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform, which uses theoretical chemistry techniques to solve problems in condensed matter physics and materials science. It was a project of the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas.
theSkyNet was a research project that used volunteer Internet-connected computers to carry out research in astronomy. It was an initiative of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), a joint venture of Curtin University and the University of Western Australia. theSkyNet had two projects, Sourcefinder and POGS. Both projects have been completed. theSkyNet Sourcefinder aimed to test and refine automatic radio sourcefinding algorithms in preparation for radio galaxy surveys using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder and the Square Kilometre Array. theSkyNet POGS used Spectral Energy Distribution fitting to calculate characteristics of many galaxies using images taken by the Pan-STARRS PS1 optical telescope in Hawaii.
DreamLab is a volunteer computing Android and iOS app launched in 2015 by Imperial College London and the Vodafone Foundation.
