VGTU project@Home

VGTU project@Home is hosted by the Vilnius Gediminas Technical University in Lithuania. The project is active since 2012 and it aims to provide a powerful distributed computing platform, using BOINC, for scientists to perform research in various area.

There are currently two sub-projects available on the website :

• Visual cryptography
• Grillage algorithm optimization

Visual cryptography

Visual cryptography is a technique which uses visual information to encrypt a message and allows effective and efficient secret sharing between a number of trusted parties. It is especially useful when you want to provide a means to decrypt information without a computer [1].

Wikipedia has a nice animation showing this effect where 2 combined pictures (shares) produce the word “Wikipedia” [1].

Some real-world examples are secure banking applications against fake website authentication theft, multi-layer ID cards and secured fingerprint [2][3].

The scientists from VGTU have been working together with their colleagues at KTU to further optimise this technique, for which substantial distributed computing power was needed. This sub-project has now completed with a number of published papers on the website [7].

Grillage algorithm optimization

Grillages are a common type of civil engineering structures that are widely used in construction, especially in case of weak grounds [4]. The picture below presents a typical grillage build in construction [6].

(source: [10])

The optimal grillage should meet two criteria [4]:

1. The number of piles should be minimal
2. The connecting beams should receive the lowest possible torques, resulting in minimal consumption of concrete for beams.

VGTU Department of Information Technologies is studying the performance of various global optimization algorithms and in their scientific research they employ significant parallel/distributed computational resources [5].

If you would like to donate your CPU cycles
to this project, join VGTU project@Home

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 [8]. VGTU project@Home is one of the twenty-six whitelisted projects and Team Gridcoin has 140 active participants on this project.

BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) is a distributed Internet platform and was launched beginning of 2002. It rewards participants with credits for performed work. BOINC is software which uses the unused CPU and GPU cycles on computers to perform scientific work. Currently there are over 170,000+ active members using BOINC and supporting 49 different projects [9].

Sources

1. Visual cryptography - Wikipedia
2. Secure banking authentication
3. Visual cryptography application
4. Global Opitmization of Grillage using simulated annealing and high performance computing
5. Application for grillage optimization
6. The grillage foundation and its main characteristics
7. Application for dynamic visual cryptography based on non-linear oscillations
8. Gridcoin
9. BOINC - Wikipedia
10. House under constructioin

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