(Participation in this project is FREE. It makes use of unallocated resources within your PC and causes no detectable degradation of performance.)

One in four of us will at some time suffer from cancer. The high mortality rate, the suffering experienced by patients from the side effects of existing treatments, and the high costs of treatment all contribute to making cancer a priority for drug research.

By joining the United Devices network, you can have a direct benefit to cancer research. The UD software sits in the background on your PC and utilises any spare capacity to analyse data for cancer research projects. (It can also be set just to run when your computer is idle if you are concerned about your PC performance being compromised, but, in reality, there is very little overhaead and even running live you should see no degradation.)

Each individual computer analyzes a few molecules and then sends the results back over the Internet for further research. This project is anticipated to be the largest computational chemistry project ever undertaken and represents a genuine hope to find a better way to fight cancer. (You can also choose to work on anthrax or smallpox.)




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The link to the site is http://www.grid.org/projects/cancer/

Downloading the agent takes only a few minutes and once it is done it will function quite happily on its own. You can make adjustments to how and when it runs very easily. There is a very comprehensive FAQ section to help.

I have set up a MoneyAM BBers team so that we can pool our work and statistics. Why not join in and see how much of a difference MoneyAM can make?

The link to our team is MoneyAM Users Team - JOIN NOW
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Join us today and make a difference while you make money. One day you might be grateful to take advantage of the developments this research achieves.

Don't just make a donation, make a difference!

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PS Thanks to MegaBucks who suggested the idea of starting here.

skg,

Problems here also,i think they must be doing something to there servers !!!!

Mega...

Unfortunately the forum website forum.grid.org seems to be down as well, so no news
skg

I cant connect either... maintenance?

SM

Looks like the UD Cancer Research Project may be up and running again
skg

The Grid Forum says that they where moving their facility which required a full shutdown.
skg

i stillhave not been able to connect..

SM

Haven't noticed any problems, but then apparently I've been working on the same project for 285 hours!! Only 11 more to go.

Pipetrader,
You must be on the Human Proteome Folding Project rather than the Cancer Research Project which takes about 24hrs on a P4 1GHz. My slowest, a PII 400MHz laptop takes 120hrs.
skg

skg - yes, it was. Now on a cancer project, so the system must be up and running again.

Down again

Posted: Tue Nov 29, 2005 11:10 pm Post subject: Grid.org outage

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Dear Members,

We have incurred a major outage at our new facility due to a bad circuit breaker. This caused everything including the forums to be down for a while. We are in the process of recovering now. All of the servers are still not up which is why everyone is getting the backing off message. This will be corrected as soon as possible.

This outage is not related to the old hardware, but an issue related to the facility move. We did not anticipate this outage, but with a facility move of this magnitude, some temporary glitches are not surprising. Please bear with us while we work through these issues and again thank you for your contribution.
_________________
Robby Brewer
Senior Support Engineer
United Devices

This now a regular event. I normally have to re-register when it comes back on.
According to them I have about 18 machines registered but I only have 4.
Is there anywhere else that I can let use my spare capacity to achive the same results like helping someone to find cures.
Graeme.

Graeme
I think that we all suffer from the same frustration. A least this latest disruption did not create another set of phantom machines as previous ones have. For me there are pros & cons to moving to another project. The current UD Cancer Research Project meets most of my criteria for contributing:
1. I am directly participating in a cancer drug discovery project
2. It is for a UK academic organisation
3. Being in a team creates an active participation through competition

After over a year of contributing CPU time to the project we should now have a comprehensive list of cons, mainly centred on the not infrequent site outage problems.

These really play on the the conflicting problem of running machines 24/7 with the subsequent waste of energy. I personally find the breaks useful as I use the down time to perform additional maintenance and the turn them off and give them a rest from running at 100% load.

Another alternative is to see if it is possible for one or more of the team to keep a store of work units that could be distributed if the UD site is down.

It would be shame if individuals or the team felt that it was time to move to another project but I have found the following site, the Center for Distributed Computing has a list of similar projects.
skg

skg
Thanks for your coments. You sumed it up with the word "frustration", I find it hard to understand why more people haven't signed up to this when it appears that if we all made a little effort / contribution by signing up, then huge problems like a cure for cancer could be found. (from little acorns great Oaks do grow). But then I become frustrated when I think such a great opportunity could be lost because of what appears to be poor performance by the people running it. I will hang fire for the moment to see if things improve, then if they don't then I will see if my tinyy contibution could be beter used by someone else to achive a similar goal.
Lets all keep crunching and trying to make a difference.
Graeme.

Not sure why you're having to reregister Graeme, the only time I ever had to was when they lost their whole database. I just ignore it and it reconnects by itself eventually.

I have done a bit of research, there is a program called UD Monitor that will download and manage multiple work units. I will install it over the weekend and comment back on it's usefulness.
skg

Kayak, Thanks.I have a total of four machines but now show 18. I can understand +2 because of new hard disks and +4 if every one had to re register, that makes 10 but I don't know where the other 8 have come from or why. There are only four active.
The other problem ( I now just ignore) is in device manager I cant set connection type and they are all showing not known because anything else I try I get duplicate device message error.

skg.
I like the sound of that, at least I won't be wasteing power leaving them on all the time. I will look for your update after you have tryed it. Cheers. Graeme.

Graeme and skg, hope you two keep up the good work, the team will look distinctly weak if you quit! I thought I lost points in the summer downtime, so recently when I couldnt check progress I logged off f.t.b. Ive just got the one machine (perry97) are you using a special number cruncher? If this is part financed by a British university maybe theres a shortage of funds to meet demand until the numbers click bringing the breakthro we all hope for. I am down as having 7 machines !!

Graeme
You can rename the old duplicate devices.
e.g. I renamed the two old duplicate devices skgpc_1 to skgpc_1z and skgpc_1y
You can then set the connection type for your current device

skg

I have downloaded the latest version of UD Monitor. I am testing it out to see how useful it is managing multiple work units on multiple PC's.

skg

Hi skg,
any update on how you are getting on with the latest version (post 101).
I am back to having problems conecting, downloading and displaying stats. one machine hasn't been able to conect for weeks. Graeme.