Help Defeat Cancer (HDC) Project Launched

[Adywebb]

World Community Grid is pleased to launch Help Defeat Cancer (HDC). The main objective of this project is to utilize advanced imaging and pattern recognition algorithms to determine the spectral and spatial signatures of breast, head, and neck cancers during the course of disease progression. For more detailed information and FAQs about HDC, please press the Research button in the upper navigation bar or click here.

In addition to providing information about this project, we have created a forum for discussions on Help Defeat Cancer. To participate in this forum, please press the Forums button in the upper navigation bar or click here. Only forum authors with the title "Help Defeat Cancer Scientist" are authorized to comment as representatives of the research organizations: The Cancer Institute of New Jersey (CINJ) and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ).

HDC is one of three projects running on World Community Grid. One project is FightAIDS@Home, which has been running on World Community Grid since November of 2005. For more detailed information and FAQs about FightAIDS@Home, please press the Research button in the upper navigation bar or click here. Another project is Human Proteome Folding Phase 2 (HPF2), which has been running on World Community Grid since June of 2006. For more detailed information and FAQs about HPF2, please press the Research button in the upper navigation bar or click here.

Because there are three research projects running on World Community Grid, your grid agent could receive work units from any of the three projects. You may elect to focus your computer's time on only one or two of the projects. To do so, press the My Grid button in the upper navigation bar and select My Projects or click here.

HDC uses software provided to World Community Grid by the project's sponsor, CINJ.This software requires considerable disk space and memory. Therefore, HDC will not run on all PCs or laptops. To see the minimum system requirements for HDC, go to Help and search on "System Requirements" or click here. If your PC does not meet the minimum system requirements for HDC, you may still be able to participate in FightAIDS@Home and HPF2. If your PC does not qualify for any of the 3 projects, then your grid agent will show a “paused” message until a project with smaller minimum system requirements is available.

If you are already a member of World Community Grid, there's nothing that you have to do to prepare for HDC. The next time your grid agent communicates with the servers, it will send you either an HDC work unit, a HPF2 work unit, or a FightAIDS@Home work unit. The work unit your computer receives is determined randomly. To know which project you are running, please double-click on World Community Grid's icon in the system tray, and you will see the title of the project on the upper left-hand corner of the agent's homepage.

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread?thread=8041

 

[Adywebb]

Minimum System Requirements for HDC

For the UD Agent:

For the Help Defeat Cancer project, the minimum requirements are:

* At least a 200MHz Intel Pentium™ processor or equivalent
* At least 750 MB RAM (with virtual memory enabled)
* 2000 MB Hard Disk Drive with at least 500 MB available for use
* The ability to display 8-bit graphics at 800x600 resolution
* An Internet connection with minimum 40 kbps speed
* Operating System: Windows 98, ME, 2000 or XP

For the BOINC Agent:

For the Help Defeat Cancer project, the minimum requirements are:

* An Intel or AMD x86 processor equivalent to 200MHz
* At least 750 MB RAM (with virtual memory enabled)
* 2000 MB Hard Disk Drive with at least 500 MB available for use
* The ability to display 8-bit graphics at 800x600 resolution
* An Internet connection with minimum 40 kbps speed

 

[muckshifter]

Thanks for that Ady.


ouch, 750mb ram ... better get some more.

 

[peahouse05]

Help defeat cancer

Thanks Guys,
That's the one for me!
Cheers,
peahouse05

 

[Me__2001]

these babies sound pretty damn tough i think my system will cope but how much of that RAM do they want free ?

 

[Ian]

Excellent - I'll be doing this

 

[Adywebb]

Project Selected By Default

Be aware - HDC is added to the list of projects you will receive automatically by default - if your PC is not up to the spec needed to run these, then please go to your My Projects page at WCG and unselect it


Edit: Forgot to mention - if you run the UD agent then you can select/unselect which projects to run on each individual machine via the agent.

However if you have multiple machines running Boinc, then the projects selected via your My Projects page at WCG apply to ALL your machines - therefore if just one of them is under spec, then you cannot run it on any of them.

The only options in this situation is to use the UD Agent on it (or your higher spec machines) or continue with Boinc, but set it up separately under a different username

I'm hoping that the forthcoming new Boinc Version will allow for separate project selection.....

 

[Adywebb]

these babies sound pretty damn tough i think my system will cope but how much of that RAM do they want free ?

Latest from the Techs at WCG :

"Unlike the other projects which allocate a lot of virtual memory but use only a small portion for most of the time, this project uses lots of memory and touches most of it all the time. Thus if the machine had less than that amount of ram, paging activity (moving memory contents to disk and back) would go way up and make the machine sluggish. Thus we set the minimum high enough to not cause problems. There are periods of time during which the application has less virtual memory allocated, but when it gets to the points where more is needed, this requires a higher minimum"

 

[Anon_F]

How does WCG work out how much hard drive to use?
Or do i need to change a setting to allow for more space on the hard drive to be used?

 

[Adywebb]

That is a good question feckit - especially as the HDD requirement has increased as well

I have asked it over at WCG and await a reply

Edit: As 2000Mb = 2Gb, and 500MB = 0.5GB (roughly ), then as long as you set the max in your WCG profiles to around 5GB + then I would imagine that will be OK - I think the default is 10GB

 

[V_R]

Nice one Ady, I'll be doing that one.

EDIT: I lost that little cruncher i had, it cant cope with the bigger wu's. But in a way thats good coz now it means i can crunch cancer.

 

[Adywebb]

Further Update

Ok folks, regarding my last post I may be wrong in as much as apparently Boinc will automatically detect the amount of RAM and decide whether or not to download.

BOINC reports the amount of RAM, so it should not be a problem. Any machine without enough RAM will not download a HDC unit.

What is not exactly clear as yet is whether it will then just happily download another projects unit without a hitch - I am awaiting clarification.

This will also mean you are not going to be able to select HDC only if you want work on all your machines including low spec ones, therefore you will get a mixture of WU's from all selected projects on all your Boinc machines.

I also note he also says 'it SHOULD not be a problem'

I apologise if I am creating confusion here , I am trying to clarify all potential problems early so we can all crack on and fight cancer

 

[floppybootstomp]

Good news.

I have two machines with 1Gb RAM, the other only has 512Mb so I'll use two solely for Cancer research, the other to process HIV WU's.

And here's some details of the actual Cancer Research we'll be helping with: Tissue Microarray Technology

 

[Adywebb]

Thanks Flops

Out of interest, how are you setting up your machines to do HDC only on 2 and HIV only on the other?

 

[floppybootstomp]

Thanks Flops

Out of interest, how are you setting up your machines to do HDC only on 2 and HIV only on the other?

I've just realised I can't

Nevermind, I have HIV & Cancer ticked, I'll get some of each for now.

If the machine with only 512Mb of memory accepts any cancer WU's, I'll probably switch to cancer only.

 

[Adywebb]

Another Update

Probably a good thing too Flops, sounds like there may be a shortage of units available to download

Latest Update:

We do not recommend a HDC-only profile. The work units are slowly generated by a scanner working over a Tissue Micro Array, which has been prepared by a skilled technician. We hope to soon be returning results almost as fast as they can prepare the slide. Fast turnaround will let them experiment quickly with different techniques for staining and preparing the slides. But this means that a machine dedicated to HDC-only will often be waiting idle.

The increase in HD space should not be bad. Unless you are running multiple projects, I would imagine that 1 GB covers it with room to spare.

But I am just guessing until we have been running it for a few days.

This also answers feckits earlier question regarding required HD space - the default of 10GB will be fine, or you can even decrease it a bit if you wish

 

[Anon_F]

Probably a good thing too Flops, sounds like there may be a shortage of units available to download

Latest Update:

This also answers feckits earlier question regarding required HD space - the default of 10GB will be fine, or you can even decrease it a bit if you wish

So i don't need to change anything over at WCG then.
The reason i ask as i could not find the right page to set changes to hard disk space anyway

 

[CaptHook]

The Cancer units are a killer in terms of Memory Use. One 1 unit here a Intel 930 with 2 gigs of Ram, my ACAD has been reduced to a crawl.

the Intel 805's with 1 gig of ram each are barely coping with any other usage and the swap file has grown to almost 1 GIG. Time to shop around for more DDR2 800 ram.

Meanwhile I have sent all my units over to Cancer . I have over 60 hours of errors on HPF2 and switched that off.

Its going to be interesting to see how fast they will run out of cancer work units as most folks I know have gone to cancer only. Seems to be the Project of choice.

As for Heat here in eastern canada its been as high as 36C and has backed off to 30 C today. the 805's are running at 67C and the 930's are at 69C and holding. A good thing September is not that far away.

 

[Adywebb]

So i don't need to change anything over at WCG then.
The reason i ask as i could not find the right page to set changes to hard disk space anyway

Nope, but if you want to check then you will find it under Basic options under your Boinc Device Profiles

The Cancer units are a killer in terms of Memory Use. One 1 unit here a Intel 930 with 2 gigs of Ram, my ACAD has been reduced to a crawl.

the Intel 805's with 1 gig of ram each are barely coping with any other usage and the swap file has grown to almost 1 GIG. Time to shop around for more DDR2 800 ram.

Meanwhile I have sent all my units over to Cancer . I have over 60 hours of errors on HPF2 and switched that off.

Its going to be interesting to see how fast they will run out of cancer work units as most folks I know have gone to cancer only. Seems to be the Project of choice.

As for Heat here in eastern canada its been as high as 36C and has backed off to 30 C today. the 805's are running at 67C and the 930's are at 69C and holding. A good thing September is not that far away.

Hi Harvey - haven't seen you for a while

Yep them new HDC wu's are very memory intensive even though they complete quite quickly.

As you say Cancer work is the one everyone's been waiting for, so demand is going to be high - if you are going to run that only, I would keep an eye on it incase they run out and your sitting idle.

Still in the 30's here, and my rigs seem to be holding out OK - can't complain about this weather though, I love it - bring it on!!

 

[Adywebb]

Cool HDC Update

Well this future Project Selection update would seem to clear up any possible shortages of work on the new HDC project and will ensure your machines are not idle if HDC units temporarily run out

We are going to deploy within the next week an additional option to the 'My Projects' page.
This will allow you to select projects like you do now. However, there will be an additional check box which states 'Allow work to be sent from other projects if work cannot be sent for my selected projects'.
The way this works is that if you select only HDC and check this new option then each time one of your computers running the BOINC agent connects to the server it will look to see if there are any HDC workunits that it can send that computer.
If there, then the computer gets that workunit. If there aren't, then it will randomly send a workunit from another project.

This new option will only apply to BOINC.

Good news