Team Ireland News Letter 29th Feb 2008
Introduction
I want to welcome you all to the new team Ireland and Irelandboinc.com computing for science website. This is the first news letter we have produced for the team so please forgive me if it’s a bit rough. I just want to welcome any new members to the team and say thanks for joining team Ireland. I would also like to say thanks to the team members that have been with this team for a long time. I hope you will all enjoy the new website and we hope that in time this website will become a valuable source of information, news and chat about all the BOINC science projects.
Irelandboinc.com and team Ireland website
Just recently we gave this website a complete overhaul with a brand new forum for chatting and a super website that we can use to build up information about the BOINC projects. A lot of hard work has gone into the website so we would love to get some feedback. Just visit the forum and tell us what you think.
Project of the Month - by Timmygadget
Each month from January this year we have been taking part in a team Ireland project of the month. For January and February the project was Malaria@home and we set ourselves a target to reach a team credit score of 100,000 by the end of February. We met this target with three and a half weeks to spare. The project of the month for March will be LHC@home, we would like as many volunteers as possible to join this project for the month of March.
Team Ireland's project of the month for March 2008 is LHC@home. This is the worlds largest particle accelerator and it is based in the CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research, Geneva, Switzerland. It is a 27KM ring under the ground where they are planning to accelerate particles up to the speed of light and smash them together inside the Atlas Detector to see what happens. You can join the team on this project using the following details;
LHC@Home. Project URL; http://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/ 
Top 10 hints to keep your Windows PC crunching – By Shane O’Malley
Hard Disk Most people forget about it but your Hard Disk slows you down the most if it gets untidy. It is essential to defragment regularly. A regular weekly schedule is good and if you have the time do it in Safe Mode, the results are much better.
Memory Plenty of RAM. Try and have a min of 1GB installed, 2GB is better to run most applications and leads to a huge drop in application errors. 3.4 GB is the limit on all 32bit operating systems so any more will be wasted.
Security Programs Good anti-virus. It goes without saying that it is essential these days. However many AV products are blotted and inefficient. They try to do everything for you, take control of everything and keep telling you what they are doing. This eats up recourses and wastes your time. It should just do its job and tell you when there is a problem. Kaspersky is good but so are many of the free AV’s such as AVG. Best still is to have your AV, anti spyware etc running at your network gateway but that is not suitable for most.
Windows Operating system updates while a pain, are much more effective and keeping your system clean than any AV system. Get your updates early as the exploit will be only a few days behind.
Programs Clean out junk. If you have not used an installed program for over 6 months, chances are you don’t need it. Uninstall it. If it is installed it is slowing you down.
System Utility software. There are many packages that do a lot of the above for you and do it well. Tune-Up Utilities is one of my favourites’ and will be the best €25 you have spent on your system. Even get the 30 day trial to clean out your system.
Startup Programs. Many programs like to start when windows starts. Generally there is no good reason for them. Go to Start-> Run-> msconfig and select startup items. You can then mark the items you don’t want to start. You can always switch them back on if it causes a problem.
Registry. While most people don’t want to touch it, many of the most common issues arise there and are cured there. Remember that free shareware program you installed to try out but did not like. Well it left all its junk in the registry when you uninstalled it. Run a registry cleaner on your system monthly. CCleaner is good and free. Tune Up Utilities will also do the job.
Free Space Make sure you have at least 20% free space on your Windows drive. 10% is the min but 20% will really help. HD are cheap these days so there is no excuse.
Reinstall. Rarely done by most users but there is no doubt the huge benefit to be got by reinstalling your operating system and programs when things are crawling along. Hard to keep all the disks available but there are utilities to allow you to “Ghost” your clean install. This means that you can very quickly replace your well used install with the clean one. Very important that you plan ahead for this. Keep your data, music, movies on a separate HD or well backed up.
Boinc in the beginning- Written by Dr David Anderson, compiled by Timmygadget
Dr. David Anderson is the chief architect behind BOINC. Without his vision and enthusiasm maybe distributed computing would not have reached the world in quite the same way as it has. It is through his foresight that we can harness the power of potentially millions of computers around the world in support of science.
David’s work as a professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley was specifically distributed computing related. Like so many “distributed” efforts back then, the technology was not quite mature enough. It was not until 1995 when one of his old graduate students, David Gedye, suggested that SETI@home might be a practical thing to do. Going beyond SETI@home, as a more generalised concept extended to other potential science projects, enthused both the David’s but again it failed to materialise as anything more than theory. It was, however, the point at which BOINC was born conceptually.
With the prospect of hundreds of millions of PC owners connecting to the Internet in years to come David was convinced of his ideas. After a false development start that was driven primarily by commercial possibilities, the notion of volunteer-based distributed computing power was shelved again. David was unhappy to see profit being the main driver and incentive for success in this field. January 2002 saw the real beginnings of BOINC coming to life. Two science projects, which became ClimatePrediction.net and Folding@home, were keen on David’s concept and saw the potential. Encouraged, David applied for and won funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in September 2002.
David’s ambition for an open source distributed computing solution, driven by volunteer computing and helping solve computationally demanding scientific problems was about to be delivered. In an environment free of central control, BOINC has been, and continues to be, delivered within strict standards. Its popularity grows as more and more projects and volunteers find it and get hooked by its utility value.
“I think our current success is just the tip of the iceberg. We want to increase participation to tens of millions of people, and hundreds or thousands of science projects.”
Dr. David Anderson
Featured Video - LHC@home
This video gives a tour of the LHC (underground accelerator) at CERN. Measuring 27km in circumference, it will become the world's largest particle accelerator when it inaugurates near the end of this year. The Atlas detector is currently running and should be in full swing by the end of this year.
Final Rap!
This news letter was written by myself, Timmy and Shane, so thanks to the guys for your help with this. If you have any family and friends that would be interested in computing for science, tell them about Irelandboinc.com and get them involved. We are keeping this news letter short so you can take the time to explore the new website. Have a look around and see what you think, we have made lots of improvements here and we hope you like them. Do visit the forum and post a message to say what you think. Thanks for crunching with the team and chat to you next month in the April news letter.
Chat later,
John.
www.irelandboinc.com
