[CAnet - news] Grids for Kids: Building the Foundation for Innovation

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[Here are a series of excerpts from various articles in GridToday -
www.gridtoday.com.  I fully concur with the various articles that web
services, Web 2.0 and Grid 2.0 has the potential to be transformative in the
education of science and engineering. It will make much more scientific
data, instrumentation and other facilities accessible not only to scientists
around the world, but students and enable citizen science -- BSA]

  
  
  The key to economic growth for companies and the countries and regions 
  they call home is the educational level of their workforces. Many 
  world leaders who recognize this also recognize the importance that 
  Internet Communication Technology (to the point that it's an acronym 
  -- ICT) has as a tool for both education, as well as implementation of 
  completive business process in the near future. Grid computing and 
  communications as a metaphor for large-scale distributed computing and 
  communications will be a cornerstone of the growth of ICT, and hence 
  will play an increasing role in this growth, particularly as Grid 
  evolves from Grid 1.0, which was focused on large-scale simulation, to 
  Grid 2.0, which is focused on large-scale collaboration.

The first wave of discussion on this topic started a few years ago and 
  centered on Grid 1.0 usage, primarily exploring ways the cost could be 
  amortized across a wider base. Essentially, the PCs in the classroom 
  would be made available to business and scientific research and the 
  multi-use could help spread the cost. For a very slick example of how 
  this works, I'd recommend going to the site 
  <http://www.tryscience.com>.

Grid 2.0 is all about enabling mass collaboration. 
  Students around the world in the critical grades for economic growth 
  (8-12) have opted in with their fingers and eyeballs to large-scale, 
  albeit shallow, collaboration though Web 2.0 sites such as MySpace, 
  which boasts more than 40 million users.
  
[A good example of participatory citizen science]

  Think you have the right stuff to spot interstellar dust? The 
  Planetary Society, in conjunction with the University of California at 
  Berkeley, is looking for good dust-spotters to join Stardust@home, a 
  project where Internet users search for microscopic interstellar dust 
  particles captured by NASA's Stardust spacecraft.
  http://planetary.org/programs/projects/stardustathome/


  Each Stardust@home user will use an online "virtual microscope" to 
  look for signs of interstellar grains in focus movies fed to the 
  virtual microscope at random. Anyone on the Internet can sign up to 
  help scan the aerogel for tracks left by speeding grains of 
  interstellar dust. The human eye, along with good old-fashioned human 
  intelligence, is better at spotting interstellar dust grains than a 
  computer program.  
  
  Unlike SETI@home, where the computer processed all the data, 
  Stardust@home is a hands-on activity. Each volunteer scanner will need 
  to pass a test by spotting tracks made in test samples. The team will 
  also keep scanners vigilant by regularly throwing "ringers" into the 
  mix in the form of an artificially made track to see if it is found. 
  Only results from users with a proven track record (spotting real or 
  created dust tracks) will be considered in pinpointing the location of 
  real interstellar dust particles. Discoverers will then have the 
  chance to help name the dust grains that they find.

In recent months, though, the number of volunteer distributed 
  computing projects has grown even larger, culminating (to this point) 
  with this week's announcement of CERN's Africa@home 
  <http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/728303.html>, which seeks to help 
  scientists better understand the malaria epidemic in Africa. Computer 
  owners now have to choose from fighting AIDS, fighting malaria, 
  fighting avian flu or fighting global warming -- and that's the tip of 
  the (rapidly melting) iceberg. Then, of course, there are the less 
  timely but still interesting projects like SETI@home, Great Internet 
  Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) or the human proteome folding project, 
  to name a few. A complete (as far as I know) list can be found at 
  <http://www.distributedcomputing.info/projects.html>.

Malaria is responsible for about 1 million deaths every year in 
  sub-Saharan Africa, and is the single biggest killer in children under 
  five. The MalariaControl.net program is being used to simulate how 
  malaria spreads through Africa. Running the simulations on thousands 
  of volunteer computers will enable researchers to better understand 
  and improve the impact of introducing new treatments.
  
  To install MalariaControl.net, volunteers just need to download the 
  necessary software from the Africa@home Web site, which will do the 
  scientific calculations in the background while the users are doing 
  something else. The results are regularly returned to a server at the 
  University of Geneva, so that the researchers can evaluate them. 
  Already, in a first test phase over several months with 500 
  volunteers, Africa@home was able to run simulations equivalent to 150 
  years of processing time on a single computer.
  
  A key objective of the project was to involve African academic 
  institutions in the development of the software. Thanks to the efforts 
  of NGOs ICVolunteers and Informaticiens sans Frontieres, researchers 
  from the University of Bamako in Mali and the Agence Universitaire de 
  la Francophonie in Bamako and in Yaounde, Cameroon, were able to join 
  the project team, which was based at CERN. They were funded by the 
  Geneva International Academic Network (GIAN).



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These news items and comments are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect
those  of the CANARIE board or management.

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