NSF Awards University of Richmond $401,193 Grant to Study Security and Integrity of Computing Platforms

October 31, 2005

The National Science Foundation has awarded three professors at the University of Richmond a grant of $401,193 to study the security of distributed volunteer computing platforms, in which personal computers connected to the Internet volunteer idle processor time to complete computations once feasible only by expensive supercomputers.

Doug Szajda, Barry Lawson and Jason Owen, all assistant professors in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, began work on the project in 2002. The grant provides funding through 2008, allowing the professors to set up a distributed volunteer computing platform at the university and to fund undergraduate students participating in the research.

“The potential impact of this research is extensive,” said Szajda. Applications for secure computing platforms exist in biomedical research, such as computational chemistry, genetic sequence comparisons and protein folding operations. In addition, “access to more secure computing platforms is likely to draw commercial applications and will foster future inter-disciplinary research among scientists and practitioners,” he said.

The professors’ research will attempt to answer the questions: “How do you know the results you get from a computing platform are correct?” and “How can you use a computing platform and continue to keep your data private?”