The way forward

We had an outing to Table Mountain, the Two Oceans aquarium, and ended up for lunch at Lelapa Restaurant.

Now the workshop has come to an end. It was in some ways supposed to be a prototype workshop, or a showcase, and it has succeeded far beyond that. There are two main streams of participants interested in BOINC technology. First, those who study computer science and grids and may wish to contribute to BOINC or run it for scientists in their institutions, or to use it as a topic to teach various open source technologies and distributed computing. Secondly, the scientists who have models that may benefit from being ported to BOINC, or BOINC-ified. At this workshop the focus was on disease modelling, but any model or problem which lends itself to parallel computation could benefit. In fact, due to the immense resources available, some scientists may wish to hammer their model into such a shape --- the investment may turn out to be worth it. On the other hand, running a model on BOINC includes a large amount of administration too. It remains to be seen which of the many proposals put forward by the participants will (or should) come to fruition and benefit from BOINC.

Kudos to Ben and Francois who have been building the Africa@Home community for years, and I think have taken a major step forward in this workshop.