Sapphires and Cobblestones for science!

This month I received one of the more notable badges you can get by donating your idle computing time for science with various electronic devices.

In my case these are retired smartphones that are repurposed for a benevolent goal instead of decorating a landfill or being partly recycled at best. They also get occasionally assisted by a laptop on sunny days to run on solar power (green science huzzah!).

The computing power of such is as expected little compared to the blunt force a rack filled with graphical cards can muster. But so is the power use: a few Watts invested is all they need and no noise is an extra perk . Just be mindful to set temperature limits or you will face lithium battery bloat and the risks that come with it.

Anyway, this time it's a Sapphire badge for the Openzika project hosted by the World Community Grid.

So what is the Zika virus?

The Zika disease is caused by a virus transmitted primarily by mosquitoes.
People with Zika virus disease can have symptoms including fever, skin rash, muscle and joint pain or headache. These symptoms normally last a week.
There is scientific consensus that Zika virus is a cause of microcephaly for infants and the Guillain-Barré syndrome. Links to other neurological complications are also being investigated.

This has been in the news a year or 2 ago, when the South America's had an outbreak with babies born with micro encephalitis.

And here's the link to the project:
https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/zika/overview.do

These are the required running times for each badge:

• Bronze - 14 days
• Silver - 45 days
• Gold - 90 days
• Ruby - 180 days
• Emerald - 1 year
• Sapphire - 2 years
• Diamond - recognizing higher levels of contribution of 5, 10, 20, 50 and up to 100 years of computing time.

- Seems to be my best project yet!

Getting a Sapphire badge means you donated exactly 2 years of continuous computing time with a processor, the other half dedicated to Rosetta@home.

Which at this moment of writing has contributed 205,011 Cobblestones of computation (177.13 quadrillion floating-point operations) to Rosetta@home.

-Badge for being in the top 25% in average credit.

I observed my cluster of smartphones and it seems they favor solving the Zika project, ofcourse not all projects are compatible with Android based platforms but the compatible Childhood Cancer project doesn't seem to get much time compared to the former with only a half year of running time. Overall Rosetta@home has a mild advantage over WCG in task preference, as seen in the picture below.

Sources and images:

• the World Community Grid.
• ‎the Rosetta@home project.
• ‎Boincstats.com.
• ‎World Health Organisation: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/zika/en/.

If your interested in crunching these projects go to:

https://boinc.berkeley.edu
https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/ (Rosetta@home)

You also can earn cryptocurrency while helping out with the variety of research projects called Gridcoin (GRC), read up all about it on:

https://gridcoin.science/

And by searching the boinc and gridcoin topics and communities on Steemit!