本帖最后由 vincentdark 于 2013-5-11 04:57 编辑
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The Birth of Volunteer Computing志愿计算的诞生
The idea was brilliant, but not one for which investors were willing to give money to develop. Anderson and Werthimer beat the bushes looking for startup funds, but aside from a few in-kind donations, no visionary sponsor stepped forward—until they called The Planetary Society. Using the Carl Sagan Fund for the Future and a donation from Paramount Pictures, we provided the first $100,000 needed to get the project under way. 这个主意非常棒,但是却没法吸引投资者腰包中的钱。Anderson和Werthimer 竭尽全力寻找启动资金,但是除了一些热心的捐助,再没有其他有远见的赞助了,直到他们请求行星协会的帮助。通过卡尔萨根基金和派拉蒙电影公司的捐款,我们筹得了项目步入正轨所需的最初的十万美元。
And so SETI@home was born. Launched in 1999, it became an international sensation. Within a few months, millions of personal computers were displaying the dynamic power bar graphics that have become the iconic image of SETI@home. It was a startling success on a scale that even the most optimistic of SETI@home's founders never imagined. SETI@home users made possible the most sensitive search for extraterrestrial intelligence ever conducted; they also demonstrated the power and potential of volunteer computing. SETI@home became—by far—the largest and most powerful computer network ever assembled, accomplishing within months calculations that normally would have taken decades. 于是 SETI@home就这样诞生了。在1999年项目上线后,它引起了一次全球性的轰动。在短短的几个月里,数百万个人电脑上就显示着动态能量条的图像,这也成了SETI@home的标志性画面。在规模上这是一个令人吃惊的成功,即便是最乐观的SETI@home的发起人也没有料到。SETI@home的志愿者使得这个对地外文明研究中最敏感的研究项目成为可能,他们的参与也展示了志愿计算的力量与潜力。SETI@home也成为了到目前为止最大最强的计算机网络,通常需要几十年来完成的计算在短短数月间就完成了。
Scientists in other fields quickly took note and searched for ways to take advantage of the remarkable resource. A Stanford University group trying to decipher the mysteries of protein folding thought their project was ideally suited for volunteer computing. Proteins are long strings of amino acids—the building blocks of life. To fulfill their functions, proteins cannot remain as simple strings, or “necklaces,” but need to fold into specific and complex shapes. One of the most amazing mysteries of life is that proteins perform that task reliably, efficiently, and quickly. Modeling this process on the atomic scale proved to be one of the most difficult challenges of computational biology. Resolving it not only would help scientists better understand the processes of life but also could help fight some of the most crippling diseases afflicting humanity—Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, BSE (“mad cow disease”), and certain types of cancer. 其他领域的科学家们很快意识到了,并想尽一切办法来获取这个非凡的资源所带来的好处。斯坦福大学的一个尝试破解蛋白质折叠奥秘的小组也认为他们的项目能完美地适应志愿计算。由一连串氨基酸组成的蛋白质是生命的构成材料,为了实现它的功能,蛋白质不能只是保持简单的条状或是如“项链”一般,而是需要通过折叠形成特殊的而且是复杂的形状。生命最令人惊奇的奥秘之一就是蛋白质在稳定地、高效地和快速地进行着折叠。模拟这种分子水平的运行过程被证明是计算生物学中最困难的挑战。分解这种过程不仅能帮助科学家更好地理解生命的运行,而且能帮助对抗那些折磨人类的严重疾病——帕金森综合征、老年痴呆症、疯牛病以及某些类型的癌症。
The chief difficulty in simulating protein folding is time, explained Vijay S. Pande of Stanford University. Proteins fold on a time scale of microseconds (millionths of a second), but it takes an average computer about a day just to simulate the folding over a single nanosecond (one billionth of a second). At that rate, it would take almost three years to simulate a microsecond of folding and perhaps a decade or two of computer time to analyze the folding of a single protein. This is hardly a practical way to resolve the problem. 在模拟蛋白质折叠中首先遇到的困难是时间,来自斯坦福大学的Vijay S. Pande解释道,蛋白质折叠是在微秒(百万分之一秒)级别的时间内进行的。但是平均每台电脑要花费一天的时间才能模拟出一纳秒(十亿分之一秒)的折叠过程。按照这种速率,要模拟一微秒的折叠过程几乎要花费三年的时间,而要分析完一个蛋白质的折叠过程可能需要十到二十年的时间,用这种方法来研究这个问题基本上不现实。
Then came SETI@home, and Pande and his colleagues took notice. Within a year, SETI@home had logged not a decade or two but millions of years of computer time. This kind of computing power would go far toward solving the difficulties in simulating protein folding. After a year designing their own volunteer computing platform, the Stanford group launched folding@home with spectacular results. Within two years, the project's first scientific publication appeared in Nature. Although much of the long road to curing disease still lies ahead, as of this writing, the project has resulted in the publication of 49 peer-reviewed articles in established scientific journals. 这时候SETI@home的出现,Pande和他的学校也注意到了。在一年之内,SETI@home记录了不止十年或二十年,而是上百万年的计算机时间。这种计算能力将大大有助于解决模拟蛋白质折叠中的困难。经过一年的时间,他们设计出了自己的志愿计算平台,斯坦福一上线 folding@home这个项目就取得了惊人的成果。只花了两年时间,这个项目第一篇系统的科学的文章就发表在了《自然》杂志上,尽管在治愈疾病这方面还有很长的路要走。截至写本文的时候,这个项目已经在各种科学类期刊杂志上发表了49篇经学界认可的论文。
Folding@home has now reached beyond the community of PC users to volunteers in other regions of cyberspace. In late March, computer gamers using Sony's PlayStation 3 were given the chance to combine entertainment with scientific research by running folding@ home on their machines. More than 100,000 users downloaded the folding@home software within two days after it became available, with around 35,000 participating at any given time. The powerful processors at the heart of the game consoles are designed to conduct extremely fast calculations, 10 to 50 times faster than an ordinary personal computer. Thus, although PlayStation 3 consoles account for only one fifth of machines running folding@ home, they account for two thirds of the project's computing power. 现在,Folding@home已经不再局限于个人电脑用户,甚至已经扩展到其他电脑领域的志愿者了。三月底,使用索尼PlayStation 3的玩家通过在他们的主机上运行Folding@home就有机会将娱乐与科学研究结合在一起。当folding@home软件可以下载后,仅仅两天就有超过十万的用户下载,任何时候都有约三万五千台PlayStation 3在参与计算。这种游戏主机里的强大处理器被设计成拥有极快的计算速度,比普通个人电脑快10到50倍。这样,虽然只有五分之一的PlayStation 3主机运行了folding@ home,但它们却贡献了整个项目三分之二的计算能力。
纯人工翻译,采用意译的手法,考虑到汉语的用法,有部分删词或加词,请校对~
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