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]:
- The number of piles should be minimal
- 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
Sources
- Visual cryptography - Wikipedia
- Secure banking authentication
- Visual cryptography application
- Global Opitmization of Grillage using simulated annealing and high performance computing
- Application for grillage optimization
- The grillage foundation and its main characteristics
- Application for dynamic visual cryptography based on non-linear oscillations
- Gridcoin
- BOINC - Wikipedia
- House under constructioin
Thanks for reading. Follow me for more BOINC & Gridcoin related articles.
Concise but very informative article. Good job!
Thank you @hotbit, I have tried to keep it light because both sub-projects are very technical and moving in that direction would have defeated the purpose of creating this article.
I am prticipating this project. Nice Article.
Thank you @zwirzu. There are already a lot of good articles about the bigger projects (like Rosetta and SETI) but nothing has been written about VGTU project@Home yet although they are performing some very useful research as well.
My favourite is DrugDiscovery
As an aside, the cryptography work has been wrapped up and is not likely to return. For months VGTU has been working solely on grilliage optimisation for their civil engineering department.
Thank you for the feedback @dutch. I have incorporated your comments in the article.