Whats your computer doing right now? well, showing you this web page for one, playing some music too maybe? it is not very demanding stuff is it. Lets say for example it takes you five minutes to read a thread, I bet your computer has spent 4:57 of that time doing absolutely nothing. Well what if you could put that time to good use?

I am not sure how many people are aware of distributed computing projects? Distributed computing projects are usually run by organisations or institutions which are trying to solve a massive problem. A problem so massive that not even all the computing power most educational institutions have is enough. It would still take them thousands of years to finish. This is where the internet comes in, you can donate you computers idle time (that 4:57) to help them solve these massive problems.

I have recently started donating my computers idle time to a project called Folding@Home. This is a project run by Stanford university. If you remember that in 2002 'we' completely mapped the human genome. Well that is all well and good, but it is like a mechanic knowing the names of all the components of your engine but only understanding what 30% of them actually do. The Folding@Home project has tasked itself with understanding how all the proteins in the human genome actually function and interact with each other. If 'we' can fully understand this, we can better fight disease. Like the mechanic could then fix your car.

The website is: http://folding.stanford.edu/

I have joined in this project as I hope that in some small way I can help our understanding and fighting the diseases which come from protein malformation, such as Cancer. Please take 5 minutes to read the page above and I hope you will join me and millions of others from all around the world by donating your computers idle time to solving this 'problem'.

Maybe if people are interested we could setup a TW team. You can setup a team on the website, which anybody can join. All the work your computer does is then credited to that team under your name. This is the team stats page:

http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teamstats

By the way, by downloading and running this software it is NOT going to slow down your PC. It will only use what ever time your computer is idle to do its work.

Hugs,

Katherine xxx

I've heard of these things, however givent hat in the UK at least the people who think they run the place have the attitude that if its on your machine, no matter how it got there of if you even know about it its you're problem i have a few issues with this sort of thing.
The idea is 150% good, its just theres no way my machine is being willingly configured for this sort of thing until a few laws are clarified over the potential for misuse.
Tis a pity that its come to this, but given a friend of mine got into some serious trouble a while back (took a while to get out of it) after someone emailed a piccy to him, which he deleted, but had been reported for... and the fact he had done nothing to obtain it, and didn't want it anyway wasn't good enough for 'da plod'.
anyway...
I reckon my machines running at around 5% usage normally, if that, and most of thats the background windows type stuff...

Theres a massive future in this sort of thing, specifically signing up to sell spare CPU cycles to organisations that resell them, once the legal issues are taken care of.

Distributed processing is the way to go... Supercomputers for all

I used to run Seti for quite a while, but learned the hard way that desktop processors aren't designed to run at 100% capacity for 100% of the time.

Needless to say, I was unlucky enough to have picked the bad apple from the CPU basket, which would have been fine under normal use, but running seti on it for 12 months, almost constantly, burned it out.

Hi Girls,

I too used to run SETI@Home, I have a heating (or should I say cooling) issue on one of my machines which means I cannot run anything at 100% for more than five minutes without it throwing it toys out the pram. But the other two I have moved to working on this Folding project at Stanford. I think it is more likely to produce tangable benefits in the shorter term. Though you have to give SETI a lot of credit, I 'think' they pioneered distributed projects like this, at least on such a large public scale.

Hugs,

Katherine xx

I ran the SETI@home software too on another machine for a few months but got very disheartened when I didn't find any little green men straight away .. tsk, I'm such a impatient soul! Good idea though.

C x