communityCompute

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Inspiration

Computational power (such as that used in disease modeling) can be expensive. Our project aims to allow users to donate their computing power to scientific and social causes. Computational power is extremely important and expensive in the current day.

What it does

Our project allows users to donate their computing power to solve any unsolved problem on our website. Users are able to compete with one another, as they earn points based on how much computing power they contribute. Our project encourages competition with the global leaderboard.

How we built it

We first built the web worker that would be used to keep the webpage running fresh while also being able to carry out the intensive computations. We then worked to create a hookup to the Supabase platform to deal with handling the problems that require compute power and receive the results. All the server's code is hosted on an Oracle Cloud instance. We rented a domain from Namecheap and configured Caddy to automatically encrypt the domain with HTTPS. pm2 scripts and systemd settings make sure the website automatically restarts if the cloud ever goes down for a second.

Challenges we ran into

It is all our first year in college, and our first hackathon too! The most daunting thing we faced was organizational. We knew we all worked well together since we've done group projects in high school, but at the same time, one of us is intended ChemE, two are intended EE, and only one is intended CS. It was unclear what everyone's role would be, but as we progressed, we each found our niche and played to each other's strengths. The ChemE had fun working on the database, one EE liked digging in the weeds of WASM, the other worked with Oracle Cloud, and, funnily enough, the CS guy did product design.