You can help Research

innovate

This was on BBC ClickOnline this morning - let your spare computer cycles work for Research for the greater good of humanity.

World Community Grid is a not-for-profit organisation with currently over 90,000 volunteers (2,833 from the UK) who so far have clocked up over 16,000 years (YEARS!) of computer time that is being used to analyse human proteomes, and will hopefully help finding cures for nasty diseases such as Cancer and Aids.

If your computer is on a lot of the time, and you want to 'do your thing' towards a good cause, this is worth considering. The World Community Grid agent runs unobtrusively in the background.

Darksun

There's also Seti@Home, the oldest (and largest) Distributed Computing project. It analyses radio signals looking for signs of intelligent life. Less useful, perhaps, than finding cures for diseases... unless the aliens know the cures, who knows :rolleyes:

Midas

Darksun wrote:

There's also Seti@Home, the oldest (and largest) Distributed Computing project. It analyses radio signals looking for signs of intelligent life. Less useful, perhaps, than finding cures for diseases... unless the aliens know the cures, who knows :rolleyes:

Indeed there is.

Here is a link

Could make you very famous if it's your computer that finds them...

Joe_Bloggs

These projects are usually termed 'distributive computing projects' There is a list here.
I think these projects are a good thing in Winter months as the waste energy of the computer can be used to heat rooms. In the Summer months these projects just create heat and waste electricity/fossil fuels. Even worse the computers might require extra cooling via air conditioning plant in Summer months. Energy prices have rocketed recently. Fortunately when it is Summer here it is Winter in the Southern Hemisphere.
J_B.