New DC Projects

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Evolution-at-Home : Distributed Darwin

Fig. 3: The evolution-at-home project could spark debates about theories of evolution. (www.evolutionary-research.org)

The theory of evolution has intrigued and mystified scientists for years. A group, Evolutionary-Research, recently announced their plans to create a distributed computing project called Evolution-at-Home, which will investigate evolutionary theories.

The first machines being built will contain models relating to spontaneous mutation. Spontaneous mutation is a hot topic in the scientific community, as many consider it as either evidence that evolution exists or proof that it doesn't. Spontaneous mutation is also important in relation to extinction. It's possible — although unlikely — that a species could become extinct if it were to mutate and continue mutating. The Evolution-at-Home models will investigate some biological processes that will keep species from becoming extinct, and how strong they would be when actually used. ("Internet Movie Project")

Each user will get to choose one model from a select number of modules to run on their computer. While each user won't get a different model, the different variables involved will virtually ensure that the end results will be different. Thus, the simulations can be compared and analyzed very easily. The simulation the user runs will be within the computer's limits; a faster computer will receive more data to process while a slower computer will receive less.

The Evolutionary-Research-ers also want to make this distributed computing project a community of sorts. They plan on publishing all results of the simulations in ways that both scientists and non-scientists can understand, giving room for some interesting discussions between the two groups.

Internet Movie Project: Forget BlockBuster

The Internet Movie Project (IMP) is different from those above — it won't be using distributed computing methods for the benefit of mankind. It will, however, be a pioneer in the field in a different respect — it will be a project that people will be actively involved in, and it promises to be fun.

Fig. 4: how render farms work

The Internet Movie Project will be using Persistance of Vision (POV) Ray Tracers in order to create a full-length movie. The POV Ray Tracer program is a free 3-D graphics program that can be used to render astonishingly life-like 3-D images. Most of the Movie Project's members will be involved in creating the scenes for the movie; however, there are other ways to volunteer for those not proficient in Ray Tracing: many computers are needed as render farms. In a render farm, each computer generates, or renders, a piece of the picture. In this way, the whole picture — or scene — is created piece by piece — or byte by byte. Distibuted computing lends itself well to render farms, since rendering scenes takes a great deal of computer power, and each scene/frame/image can be rendered independently from other scenes and put together later. In fact, the usage of distributed computing render farms isn't new; among others, the film Antz used 250 Silicon Graphics workstations to render the movie. (Eddy) However, these were powerful computers and used distributed computing on a small scale. The IMP project would probably need more than double that amount of computers for render farms.

The Internet Movie Project does not have a deadline set for their movies. They plan on creating two movies: a short, ten minute trailor, and a 30-minute feature-length movie. They have high aspirations of creating a film that's longer than 60 minutes, but it depends on the number of computers they have for their render farms and the number of people who would be willing to create 3-D images in the POV Ray Tracing program. There would need to be plenty of people to make a 105-minute film made of almost 190,000 frames!