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Dr Sjaak Verdoold took the picture of this cover himself inside the rectangular spraying reactor. There were two nozzles on opposite sides, electro-spraying tiny but highly charged particles towards each other.

Not only did the particles have opposite charges, which made them selectively attractive to each other, but they were also labelled with a different fluorescent dye. One side showed up as greenish dots, and the other yellow-orange. The sprayed particles themselves are only 23 micrometre across and therefore in fact invisible, were it not for the fluorescent dye. A powerful laser creates a sheet of light in which the particles show up. An optical band-block filter largely blocked the laser out of the image.

Verdoold studied and modelled electro spraying, or electro hydrodynamic (EHD) atomisation, which is a spraying technique that uses an electrical field to make particles of uniform size. In the bipolar case, particles with opposite charges selectively react and recombine into coated or mixed particles, which are hard to manufacture in any other way.


Dr Sjaak Verdoold, ‘ElectroHydroDynamic Atomisation’, PhD supervisors Prof. Sef Heijnen (AS) and Dr Jan Marijnissen (AS), 2 April 2012.

It turns out you can help cure diseases, make scientific discoveries and help change the world into a better place by literally doing nothing on your computer, if, that is, you’ve donated your PC’s idle time to a global Distributed Computing (DC) project. 

DC is a way to divide a large problem that requires lots of processing power into smaller tasks that can be solved by larger numbers of computers. Basically, some projects require enormous amounts of computing power, but by using software like BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure of Network Computing), users contribute by letting their PCs process small data packages. 

The Dutch Power Cows (DPC) is a Dutch DC team that organises annual ‘stampedes’ every April. Throughout the year, DPC members donate their CPU power to projects of their choice, but during the stampede efforts are made to divert all computing power to a single project. This year that project is Malaria Control (MC).

dutchpowercows.org

Several tech-savvy TU Delft student groups are getting in on the stampeding action. EEMCS MSc student Jetze Schaafsma started the DelftInHetHuis account and lobbied for others to join, eventually getting over 30 users with 60 computers to participate. Consequently, DelftInHetHuis became the second-largest DPC producer and at that time the overall world producer for MC. 

Martin Ganeff, an aerospace MSc student, decided to join the computing project independently: “When I joined, I wasn’t really aware there were subteams competing against each other; I just wanted to be part of the project that might eventually help wipe out malaria.”

According to Schaafsma, the 2011 stampede is likely to receive more attention than previous years because it’s not about physics or math but rather about a cause directly pertaining to human health. However, the end result of malaria research isn’t the only incentive for the hundreds of participants affiliated with the Power Cows. “Part of the motivation is the challenge of winning a game and the sense of community when taking on the challenge as a group,” says Schaafsma. “With a single machine your contribution can get lost in a mass, but in a combined effort you get the feeling of being on a winning team, and that’s what really motivates people to go all-out.” 

The Dutch aren’t the only ones organizing distributed computing stampedes. As the DC community grows, DC enthusiasts around the world are uniting into teams by geographical region and organising their own stampedes: they vote for a certain cause and then divert all their idle CPU time to it. The MC project, for example, is getting an extra computing boost this year because a Norwegian team dedicated its annual Easter stampede to it. So literally anyone can organize a team and coordinate a DC stampede for a good cause.

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