World Community Grid - OpenPandemics - COVID-19 Locationless, Locationless, Locationless
By Gackt on 07-Jun-20. Waypoint GA15776

World Community Grid - OpenPandemics - COVID-19

Note: Unless by chance you are already an active member of the World Community Grid community this Locationless Cache almost certainly will not be ‘a quick find’. If you want to go ahead and start this one and are new to the grid then please read the whole page first. To shorten the reading the logging requirements are coloured green.

What is COVID-19?

I should imagine that unless you have been living in a very remote place for the last six months and have not come across the plethora of lockdown puzzle jiggy locationless caches here, then you already know. But on the off chance you do not know, then in short.. COVID-19 is a disease caused by SARS-CoV2, a virus of the coronavirus family. These viruses cause diseases that affect mainly the human respiratory system and potentially other major organs. COVID-19 can lead to serious illness or even death.

As of the publication of this Cache there is no cure or vaccine for COVID-19.

What is the World Community Grid?

The World Community Grid (WCG) is an effort to create the world's largest public computing grid to tackle scientific research projects that benefit humanity. Launched in 2004, it is co-ordinated by IBM with client software currently available for Windows, Linux, macOS, and Android OS.

Using the idle time of computers around the world, WCG's research projects have analysed aspects of the human genome, HIV, dengue, muscular dystrophy, cancer, influenza, Ebola, Zika virus, virtual screening, rice crop yields, clean energy and now COVID-19.

You can help with the COVID-19 research for free and get to log a cache find here by doing so.

What you will need to:

1. Visit the WCG website, download and install the small program or app on your device.

2. If you do not have a WCG profile already you will need to create one. To make logging this cache easier I would suggest you use your caching name, or something close to it.

3. You can log up to two finds on this cache. Once you have returned one result for 'OpenPandemics - COVID-19' you can log your first find here. Please post a screen shot as per below proving your find. If you have a WCG profile name that is very different to your caching name you will need to prove it is you some how, for example post a photograph of your screen along with your GPSr, geocoin, pathtag etc. Once you have returned 19 results or more you can log a second find here. Please post a similar screenshot or photo to prove your results.

If you have already been part of the the WCG and returned some results: You can log your first find straight away including proof as above. Once you have returned 19+ results more than used for your first log you may then post your second find.

Questions

How long will it realistically take to return the required results?

It could be as little as a 1 to 2 days, or could take a couple of weeks or more. The time will depend on the processing power of your device, or devices (yes you can install on as many devices as you want, just make sure you sign in with your profile).

I took a break from WCG in 2017 and just got back into it again on the 4th May this year when I saw they were working COVID-19. I have installed on a 4core 3.2GHz intel PC which returned the required results today, so that’s 3 days. The PC is only on for half a day, if it had been left on at night it would have completed quicker.

I also have also made a small unit that will use end of life android phones as nodes to do some processing. It currently houses one node (phone). This has been switched on for 2 days, daytime only, and has returned 1 result.

*'Cameron' (above) is named so as a referance to Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. 'The Turk' AI chess playing computer from Ep3 of the first season was built by daisy chaining the guts of 3x xboxes and 4x Playstations with custom software. My unit will be the guts of old phones strung together running custom android distribution. The casing is made from the chassis of an IBM 3580-L33 external tape drive with the drive bay covered and reinforced with metel media bay blankers from an IBM 7026-H50 pSeries server. It needed to be good strong solid metal like this in case I overload the nodes and the dying lithium batteries pop. It's only a baby at the moment with one node so at this time you don't need to have fear of.. Judgement Day ;)

Is there a security risk installing and using the WCG software?

The grid has been contributed to by thousands of volunteers for many years. There are currently over 780k people like myself happily contributing. The risk to security is low. However, our team captain at terracaching, who is an expert in this field, did give the following information to us a few years ago: "Due to hardware bugs in CPUs of almost all recent computers, code can escape from so-called “sandboxes” used to prevent them from gaining access to the whole system. This means that any program running on your computer can read your private data, despite the normal protection mechanisms from the OS, the BOINC client, etc."

But though, as I said, the risk is low, but it is up to you to make the choice if you wish to participate, and if you do what devices you install on. I, like thousands ofother people, am perfectly happy with it running on my home PC. At work, because of the nature of our business, I would not install it there. Installing it on standalone dying phone nodes like I am starting to do above, there are no issues at all.

Will my device run slower with the WCG software installed?

It shouldn't. WCG default settings are low enough that all faily modern devices will not show any performance impact. If by chance you do find your device is running slower you can manually change these settings so that the software uses less resource. You can also pause the tasks being worked on if you need to utilize all of your processing resource.

I have further techincal questions?

If I can help I will of course, but please bare in mind that I am only a contributer, I do not work for WCG or directly for IBM, and so the best place for techy info is their website.

Last notes

This is the first WCG cache I have placed on this site. There are four on terracaching.com, one of which is mine. To be able to log a few of the caches on that caching site you have to be part of the TerraCaching.com Team on WCG. You don't need to be part of a team to log this cache which is unique to this site. If people enjoy this cache, and other similar caches are created, maybe someone here might like to set up a Geocaching Australia Team... I will leave that up to one of you as, although I love joining in here from time to time, I am not Australia based.... am in the UK, the second most ravished country by CORVID-19 after the US, and so trying to do my bit to help.