Most important project in terms of research goals

[denim]

Mega-stoner's might want to leave the topic now.

I was thinking a little last night about the countless hours of processing time I have donated over the years. Maybe I was having a little moment of wanting to feel better about the power I am donating.

Now for the point of this thread, putting mega milestone projects and highest credit return per CPU and GPU projects aside........


With the premise of the here and now, what are the projects making the most difference in terms of health and well being of people as a whole?

I ask because I know many projects are great research ideas and goals, but many have little to no effect on immediate need or demand, in say the medical field for example. Just wanting to see what people feel are the projects doing the most important work, regardless of credit return.

[DrPop]

Awesome topic! I think it just depends what you're interested in. For example, to me, both MilkyWay and Einstein are pretty relevant and will achieve some great results for science over time. I also think a couple of the World Community Grid projects are pretty well thought out.
Thing is for me, only MW out of that list gets any decent credits. ;). I know, not to hijack the topic, but why does such a cool and relevant project like Einstein put out so little credit? :)
Will be interesting to see what the MM guys say on this because they've crunched a lot more different projects over the years.

[Maxwell]

Hehe... This is all dependent on how you define "important." Because I think my answer is highly dependent on what you value and whatnot...

Immediate and practical usefulness
This might sound weird, but BURP and Renderfarm. You render images, upload them, and they use them. Pretty much every other project is more theoretical in nature without the immediate use of the research results.

Biggest Disaster
Orbit. Helps find Armageddon/Deep Impact scenarios. That would suck if that happened.

Medical Usefulness
WCG and Malaria. Malaria is super awful, and WCG actually knows the research they are doing can make large impacts on the respective subproject fields.

Tangible Finds
PG and Einstein. To the best of my knowledge, those are the only two projects you can really point to and say "look at me, I found an undiscovered Prime or a new planet" or something.

Impactful to Maxwell
Distributed Data Mining - researches data analytic techniques. I like that. It's part of what I do.

Coolest Science
LHC, and LHC++. They do awesome stuff. I love following what the CERN researchers are doing, and what that means about explaining the universe. LHC was the second project I attached to (after SETI) because I liked their research so much.

[DrPop]

Hehe...
Biggest Disaster
Orbit. Helps find Armageddon/Deep Impact scenarios. That would suck if that happened.

*News Flash* For the immediate benefit of ALL human kind I propose that we drop everything and crunch ORBIT now! :D ;) j/k

Although...you have a major point there. "That would REALLY suck if that happened." :p
With that thought in mind...where does Oribt credit fall in comparison to say "mixed WU" AQUA or Primaboinca?

[denim]

Great responses guys. :)

I think I was thinking this time around, in the direction of health or immediate impact on human needs. I have a great desire to learn and find out what will happen with the data found by the LHC project. Einstein and PG are fascinating as explained above in regards to that they have tangible results. I really like the idea and goal of Orbit, kind of a big deal. Just a shame that LHC, Lattice, GeneticLife, Magnetism, Orbit etc. do not have much work to give out.

There is where I start to wonder about projects like QMC, Rosetta, Spinhenge etc. This is where a standardized credit per cycle system would be more beneficial to the medical projects. That way more people would crunch what is meaningful to them, and less about what gives the most credit.

[Maxwell]

Orbit has not had work in quite a while, but I seem to recall it was ~ABC, QMC-ish in terms of credit. Nothing close to the big boys, but pretty good in comparison to most other projects.

And I like WCG enough that I have my lappy on it. Credits slowly trickle in, but I think it's doing more good there than most other projects I'm crunching.

One project I didn't mention but like is Climate Prediction. Good and important research...

[Steve Bohlen]

Great topic. I like to think I'm actually making a difference to someone, somewhere when contributing machine time. This thread makes a nice reference for that.

[JerWA]

I always have a machine or two in WCG, but their credits are awful. It's because they had (have still?) their own credit system, so don't much care about BOINC. Now that they're fully onboard I dunno why they don't just fix it. Also since they had their own thing going, they have a fairly large base of "super users" who crank nothing but WCG. Hard to compete with someone so singly dedicated.

http://www.boincstats.com/signature/user_259_project15.gif
3rd on our team, almost 1,500th world. That should give you an idea how little we as a team participate in this project lol.

[DrPop]

...3rd on our team, almost 1,500th world. That should give you an idea how little we as a team participate in this project lol.

er...if they will just talk with the guys at AQUA about how to implement good credits, I'll crunch them 100%! Well, except for challenges, of course. But, you know what I mean. :D

[Mumps]

Personal preferred project: SIMAP They build a database cross referencing many sources of publicly released protein folding results. And make it available to any researcher that could benefit. And their monthly/quarterly updates are plugged in and available online.

QCN collects data on earthquakes to help pinpoint locations/depths and strengths of them.

For me, the Math projects are a lot of work, but I don't see much value in them. So we've calculated a billion digit long prime number. Does that resolve a world crisis anywhere? I think not. Calculating the factors on a million digit long number? Not gonna help us understand quantum physics or how the universe works any better.

The materials analysis projects bring value because they can lead to things like new molecular cooling solutions that will possibly revolutionize how Data Centers, or even homes, can be cooled much more efficiently. Or even generation for alternate fuel sources like Hydrogen producing artificial leaves.

[Maxwell]

The materials analysis projects bring value because they can lead to things like new molecular cooling solutions that will possibly revolutionize how Data Centers, or even homes, can be cooled much more efficiently. Or even generation for alternate fuel sources like Hydrogen producing artificial leaves.
Agreed - I was a huge fan of Hydrogen and wish it would come back...

[denim]

Maybe I should have titled this topic, "Warm fuzzy projects". As in which projects give you a warm and fuzzy inside when you crunch them, not caring about the credit return.

Folding@H was not mentioned, due to it not being BOINC of course, but it gives me a warm fuzzy. I will be bringing my PS3 back on line for that one soon, unless there is a BOINC project that does not require me to do any tricky mods to the PS3. Maxwell took the time to explain one project before, but I was unsuccessful at bringing my PS3 on line for it, so I went back to Folding@home.

Would be nice to have a heavy GPU project like MW or PG run on the PS3.