e-Science News Promoting the Initiative IBERCIVIS – Your Computer Doing Science Promoting the Initiative IBERCIVIS – Your Computer Doing Science
- 17/02/2010
In the 23rd February 2010, at the auditorium of the High School D. Dinis in Lisbon, there will be a meeting to promote the initiative IBERCIVIS – Your Computer Doing Science which was launched in Portugal on the 30th July 2009 (see Initiative IBERCIVIS: Citizens can donate their computer time to science). This Volunteer Computing initiative for scientific purposes conducted in cooperation with Spain welcomes the participation of citizens in a scientific research directly and in real time, offereing the processing time of their computers, in particular when they are not being used, to perform scientific computing.
The initiative IBERCIVIS – Your Computer Doing Science is part of a large social movement of scientific citizenship, giving to each person the opportunity to engage in research projects nationally and internationally through computations made on his personal computer by distributed computing techniques similar to those of Grid Computing.
The computer becomes an open window to science, creating a channel for direct dialogue between researchers and society.
The schools will also be involved in the IBERCIVIS through their computers, allowing students and teachers not only contribute to the scientific advance, but to strengthen their contact with the research being done at national and foreign laboratories.
The collaboration between Portugal and Spain in this initiative was decided in the cooperation agreements signed at the XXIV Portugal-Spain Summit, on the 22nd January 2009, in Zamora, Spain, aimed at extending to Portugal the initiative initiated in Spain in 2008. In Portugal, the initiative has the support of the Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC), the Foundation for National Scientific Computing (FCCN) and Ciência Viva – National Agency for the Scientific and Technological Culture.
The collaboration of the Institute for Biocomputing and Physics of Complex Systems of the University of Zaragozza (BIFI) and its commitment and generous work allowed a team that also involved researchers and technicians of the Portuguese Associate Laboratories Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology (CNC) and Laboratory of Instrumentation and Experimental Particle Physics (LIP), under the coordination of Professor Rui Brito, of CNC, to install in record time systems that extended the initiative and incorporated the application AmIloidE dedicated to Familial Amyloid Polyneuropathy (FAP) and Alzheimer's disease.
People wishing to join the Volunteer Computing initiative IBERCIVIS for scientific purposes can do it on the Internet in http://www.ibercivis.pt/, and may choose to work with the project AMILOIDE or any of the projects already undertaken by Spanish scientists in the IBERCIVIS, among other: simulated trajectories in the future nuclear fusion reactor ITER - International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Cadarache, France), docking of ligands to proteins in seeking remedies for certain types of cancer, simulation of magnetic materials with impurities, analysis of structural properties of amino acids and small peptides (sequences of a few dozen amino acids) that act on the brain and nervous system, simulating the behavior of light at the nanoscale important for construction of new materials, development of new computer systems and communication and improvement of solar panels. All these projects are described in the IBERCIVIS portal on the Internet (http://www.ibercivis.pt/).
This initiative extends the already very active and highly successful cooperation between Portugal and Spain in e-Science, coordinated in Portugal by the Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC), namely in the context of Grid Computing through the IBERGRID initiative launched three years ago and seeks to manage as a common infrastructure the facilities of the Computing Grid initiatives in both countries, of the cooperation in Supercomputing, and of the connection of the National Research an Education Networks of both countries ring (RCTS in Portugal and Rede Iris in Spain) crossing the border of the two countries in Valença and Badajoz.