TN-Grid - New experiment

TN-Grid is a project that uses Internet-connected computers to perform research in various scientific experiments and is based at the Research Area of Trento of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR). BOINC is used to distribute work-units to linked computers with currently 221 active participants supporting the research endeavours.

TN-Grid is initiating a new experiment to identify the gene networks for two pathologies: motor neuron diseases and hematopoietic tumors. It is using the comprehensive gene expression dataset provided by the FANTOM project to perform research that may lead to treatments for these two pathologies.

Motor neuron diseases

Motor neurons control the voluntary muscles of our body, like heart and long muscles. A motor neuron disease affects these neurons. There are several disorders causing this disease of which ALS is the most commonly known due to cosmologist Stephen Hawking, who was diagnosed in 1963 with this disease and has lately passed away.

Hematopoietic tumors

In healthy adults, approximately 10^11 new blood cells are produced daily in order to maintain steady balance in the peripheral circulation. Haematopoiesis is the formation of blood cellular components to enable this, where Hematopoietic tumors directly affect this process. Chromosomal translocations are a common cause of these tumors to develop, making it an interesting area to study for TN-Grid.

System requirements

A PC with a common CPU and Operating System can be used to perform calculations for this project but the data sets for the calculations are still large, taking around 0.5Gb disk space. The computational time, as compared to previous experiments, is taking longer due to its complexity. This in itself is a positive development because the work-units for previous experiments where too small and couldn’t keep connected computers full occupied.

Further information about the experiment can be found here

Gridcoin is an open source cryptocurrency (Ticker: GRC) which securely rewards volunteer computing performed upon the BOINC platform in a decentralized manner on top of proof of stake.

BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) is a distributed Internet platform launched beginning of 2002 and rewards participants with credits for performed work. BOINC is an application available for multiple Operating Systems and utilises the unused CPU and GPU cycles on computers to perform scientific work.

Image source: CNR, Motor neuron diseases Image, Hematopoietic tumors Image, Gridcoin logo, BOINC logo