Overview: See Simulators FAQs for more technical questions.
What do I gain by participating in evolution@home?
How can I cite the project?
What platforms are supported?
Why is this project called evolution@home?
Who is evolutionary-research?
Will we see what evolutionary question the client is trying to answer?
What is EEPSLION?
I belong to the press. What material can I use?
How about privacy?
What does it cost, to participate in evolution@home?
What do I gain by participating in evolution@home?
High-score-fame and hopefully a better world. All participants that submit personalized results are going to be listed in the high scores that consist of
several categories, so there is not only one top position. As you can enter a web-link that shall be promoted, you can use this as advertisement. From time
to time selected participants will be given the chance to be featured on the title page of this website (after having asked their approval before).
However, as evolutionary-research is a non-profit organization, we can not afford, to pay for your computer-time or give you the chance to win some cash. You would have to go to some other global computing projects to get this. However,
not many people have become rich by participating in global computing anyway, so the biggest interest for participation usually is either the questions that are
being addressed, or in the high-score-races some groups are organizing. If you care about endangered species, you are on the correct website. If you want to
help pharmaceutical companies to deliver new drugs, search for extraterrestial intelligence, crack some encryption keys, solve complicated mathematical
problems, predict the stock market or global climate, please look at the other projects. How can I cite the project?
Currently there is only the material on the web and you should cite the website as http://www.evolutionary-research.net
, not one of the other derivates. As soon as a printed reference becomes available, you will be able to find it here. What platforms are supported?
Not a small amount of time was spent to search for solutions that are as platformindependent as possible. Since the actual development takes place on
a PowerMacintosh G3, this code is available first with a Windows compile following immediately. Linux and other Unixes will follow later. Why is this project called evolution@home?
The goal of this supercomputing adventure is, to provide the opportunity for many people to do evolutionary research at home, if they have a suitable
computer. Thus, people can observe evolution at home (with the same ãliveä-reporting features that experts have access to) and get a feeling for what evolutionary factors can accomplish and what not.
Who is evolutionary-research?
evolutionary-research (with hyphen and italics) is a non-profit bioinformatics
initiative specialized in evolutionary biology. Founded by Laurence Loewe in May 2000, it started evolution@home in April 2001. Main goal is the development of
a global computing framework for evolutionary biology to allow fast analysis of evolutionary and ecological models. Will we see what evolutionary question the client is trying to answer?
You will be able to read a general introduction (on this website) before you download your simulator. Then you will be able to see all the results calculated
on your computer during a specific simulation. What may be more interesting than these numbers is the timecourse of certain parameters. You will also be
able to track this during the simulation. However, the overall results of all clients combined together need to be analyzed before publication, as this can not be
completely automated. You will be able to read about the outcome of these analyses on this website, as key-results are going to be published here. What is EEPSLION?
This is the name of the fifth redesign of the software framework currently being implemented to facilitate programming of simulations of evolution and ecology.
(ãEepsilonä was the name of the design rounds one to four). EEPSLION is coded in ANSI C++ and provides all the infrastructure necessary to analyze a biological model by global computing. EEPSLION
stands for:
- E volutionary
- E cological
- P rocess
- S imulation
- L anguage
- I nterpreter
- O rganizing
- N etwork
While the interpreted script languages are very useful for automatization of some tasks of the system administrator, all computationally intensive parts are written
in C++ to be fast. The user of the client will not have to bother with any script language or package installation. He will get an ready-to-go executable that has everything compiled into it.
I belong to the press and want to write about evolution@home. What material can I use?
You may use anything you find on this website. If you have additional questions, do not hesitate, to ask. How about privacy?
We value privacy. Email addresses supplied as part of the registration process are used only for informations about new simulators or other things of exceptional importance to evolutionary-research. Email addresses supplied
during submission of results are generally not used at all (except for instantaneous feedback, if no result was submitted). Such addresses are
neither shared with third parties nor used for promotion purposes.
The informations supplied with personalized results regarded as public, except the NameCheckPINs. While evolutionary-research keeps the latter secret, it is
committed to publish the personalization informations to honour those that have computed with us. This, however, can not be demanded, as there is not right to get published that way.
If you do not personalize your results, you will stay anonymous to the public and evolutionary-research will delete the emails that contain your address after
processing the results. Thus complete anonymity is restored. What does it cost, to participate in evolution@home?
Nothing you can not completely control and nothing you have to pay directly. However, every
global computing project has hidden costs for its participants. Compared to other projects, costs for evolution@home can be configured to be low, if run-files with complex simulations are chosen, as they
keep connection costs low (much computation for little connection). Besides that it shares the cost of having your computer on all the time. The current
simulators can not initialize dial-up connections automatically. As you have to send results back by email manually, this gives you thight control over the file-sizes transmitted.
You may want to read more on the hidden costs of participation in global computing projects in general: besides a little light bulb and a slightly higher
phone bill, there is only the small probability that your computers hardware fails due to manufacturing problems you would not notice if you rarely ever use your
computer. We recommend you not to participate (or to do anything else on your PC), when your computers room gets too hot due to summers sun or when you
have no proper backup strategy for your data in case your hardware fails. However, as you are in charge, you fully control the extent of all hidden costs. |
