You don't need to be a scientist to make discoveries

You can make a revolutionary discovery right at home, all you need is a computer.

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Distributed computing

I bought my first computer in 2010, when I started writing my thesis. Before that, I studied at the university and lived with friends in a dormitory. We also had a computer there, which we bought with joint funds. During the year, I conducted a lot of experiments in the laboratory, receiving a large array of experimental data. These data had to be processed, and for this it was not necessary to sit in a student dormitory in Lviv, it could be done at home. It was only necessary to purchase a computer.

And so, I bought my computer and connected unlimited Internet, which at that time was still considered a luxury. I still had half a year to write my thesis, so I didn't have to work every day. Very soon it turned out that, despite the presence of the Internet, I did not know what I could do on it.

Randomly wandering around various internet pages, I came across information about distributed computing. As I learned, to solve very complex problems, thousands of hours of operation of the most modern supercomputers are needed. However, a supercomputer is not a cheap pleasure, and there are not so many of them. Not every scientific project can afford to use a supercomputer. But there are many extremely complex computational tasks in the world, especially if it concerns living organisms.

Scientists managed to solve this problem by connecting many ordinary personal computers into one computer network. So they created something similar to a supercomputer. Thanks to this, every volunteer could become involved in the biggest discoveries in various fields of science. To do this, you only need to install the program on your computer. This program in the background downloads the task, the processor or video card calculates it, and the result is sent to the server. Then a new task is loaded. This goes on until you get tired of it.

I was young, I didn't know anything more interesting at that time, so I was interested in the possibility of being involved in something useful for humanity and I decided to take part in it.

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Folding@Home

The first project I came across was Folding@Home. It is held under the auspices of Stanford University. The essence of the project is to model the protein folding process in order to identify potential errors in the natural conformation. Conformational errors cause a number of clinical syndromes, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, type II diabetes, scrapie, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, mad cow disease, multiple sclerosis, and some types of cancer. The project aimed to understand how to treat all these diseases.

Source.

Without hesitation, I installed the program and started computing. How could I not help in the fight against such terrible ailments? As a bonus, you can always look at an image of the protein that your computer is calculating the structure of.

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BOINC

Eventually I got a job and got my first promotion. But the idea of saving all humanity never left me. In my new study there was an old, unused computer. I decided to use it for distributed computing.

I couldn't install the Folding@Home project there because I didn't have admin rights. While looking for ways to solve this problem, I found out about BOINC. BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) is an open software platform of the University of Berkeley for GRID computing, a non-commercial cross-platform software for organizing distributed computing.

By installing BOINC, you get access to dozens of distributed computing projects. Two or three of them were even from Ukraine. However, I was interested in saving people from terrible diseases, so I started the Rosetta@home project, which calculated the lowest energy structures of a protein.

Source.

With BOINC, you can search for cures for incurable diseases, solve math problems, study magnetic phenomena, model climate change, and even search for extraterrestrial civilizations by processing signals from a radio telescope.

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Foldit

An even more advanced way to help science is Foldit.

Foldit is a revolutionary crowdsourcing computer game enabling you to contribute to scientific research.

Source.

In this case, you are given a protein and your task is to fold it as much as possible using various tools. I tried to do this too, but if in previous cases it was enough for you to install programs and the computer did everything itself, then here you need to do everything yourself and, accordingly, spend a lot of time. At that time, I participated in the launch of a newly built chemical plant and almost lived on the job, so I did not have extra time.

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Exoplanet Watch

You can help science and make discoveries in another way. NASA invites everyone to participate in the Exoplanet Watch project.

Exoplanet Watch is a NASA citizen science project, sponsored by NASA's Universe of Learning, that lets anyone and everyone (yes, you!) learn about planets that orbit stars beyond our solar system and get involved in observing them.

No telescope? No problem! You can use our data checkout system to request data from an exoplanet observation to analyze yourself.

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Can I get paid for distributed computing?

Sometimes it creeps up on me that instead of distributed computing, I should have learned about bitcoin back then 😉 At that time, it was possible to help science exclusively voluntarily and without payment. But over time, more and more people learned about cryptocurrencies, which were then mined with the help of a processor, later a video card. All this could be done on a home computer. More and more people were mining cryptocurrency and the power of the distributed computing network was falling.

Personally, I stopped doing distributed computing around 2014. And it was not related to cryptocurrencies, as I learned about them in 2017. I got another promotion at work and no longer had an unclaimed computer at work that I could use for distributed computing. Doing this at home is not very smart, as you need to keep the computer on all the time, and it is not very pleasant to use at this time, because it is loaded with computing tasks and often hangs.

In order to increase the power of the distributed computing network, it became possible to earn cryptocurrency for it. For example, by participating in the Folding@Home project, you can earn BANANO. BANANO is a meme coin that can easily be exchanged for real money. Thanks to this, the BANANO team took first place in terms of total computing power and as of February 2023 contributed 125,444,586,135 points to the project.

The situation is the same with the BOINC project. By participating in it, you can earn Gridcoin cryptocurrency.

It is worth noting that neither Stanford University nor Berkeley University officially supports these initiatives to earn cryptocurrencies. These are exclusively initiatives of the BANANO and Gridcoin teams.

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Summarizing all that has been said, I can only note that in today's world you can, just at home, help big projects designed to help the whole of humanity. Choose the one you like and go!