sharkGrid - Your home computer can help whale shark research!

[Jason Holmberg]

I am pleased to announce the availability of another whale shark research tool funded by the British Ecological Society.

sharkGrid 1.0 allows you to donate spare cycles of your computer to whale shark research. Specifically, the processing power of your computer can be "borrowed" for resource intensive tasks, such pattern recognition or data mining. sharkGrid uses "volunteer computing" (a.k.a "global grid computing") to distribute intensive tasks between multiple computers to allow them to complete much more quickly. While your computer sits idle overnight or while you're away, it can help users of the ECOCEAN Library in their mark-recapture research.

You can learn more abour sharkGrid and participate here:
http://www.sharkgrid.org

[Jason Holmberg]

sharkGrid has now been upgraded to version 1.13. Please refresh your browser caches using the instructions at:

http://www.sharkgrid.org

Version 1.13 allows sharkGrid to take advantage of multicore processors, which means that it now uses grid computing and parallel processing in combination. On the server side, we've done a lot of optimization for better grid control and efficiency. The new gridManager architecture allows for "on the fly" management of grid servicing threads and dynamic throttling of available power (i.e. allowing more or fewer nodes to contribute).

Please lend us your computer when it's free!

Cheers,
Jason 

[Jason Holmberg]

Hi everyone,

We have recently made a lot of performance improvements to sharkGrid. If you're not doing so already, please consider contributing your home computer's spare cycles. More information is available at:

http://www.whaleshark.org/wiki/doku.php?id=how_to_join_sharkgrid

Thanks!
Jason