There are a number of projects out there. Among the best known are detecting gravitational waves, and finding a cure for cancer.SETI@home, which aims to analyze thousands of hours of data from various radio telescopes in hopes of finding intelligent life somewhere in the universe. There is also Folding@home, which aims to understand protein folding which may lead to cures for numerous diseases. There are also projects aimed at such worthy causes as curing AIDS, crunching data from the Large Hadron Collider, and finding gravitational waves, and finding a cure for cancer.
List of Distributed Computing Projects.
So what's this all about? Modern personal computers come equipped with more processing power than even the most demanding power users can consume. Plus, many people leave their computers on all the time. So, we have hundreds of thousands of hours worth of computing capacity that does unused.
These projects aim to take advantage of this unused potential. Unused processing power from personal computers (like yours) can be put to work on these serious problems for humanity. These problems require enormous amounts of data to be processed in order to be solved. Access to supercomputers is rare and expensive, and many of these projects are painfully and embarrassingly underfunded.
By downloading the client program you can attach your computer to one or more of these projects. From then on whenever your computer is idle, it will start running the necessary calculations on your share of the data. When it's done it uploads its results and downloads a new batch of data. You can follow the progress of your calculations as well as display the total amount of work you computer(s) has done for the project.
Already, the Folding@home distributed computer is more powerful than the most powerful conventional supercomputer in the world.
Once you attach to a project, you can also join or create a team. Teams are groups of people who have something in common with each other. Co-workers, churches, clubs, and other organizations form teams. Bleeping Computer has several teams already!
Folding@home BC Team: http://fah-web.stanford.edu/teamstats/team38444.html
SETI@home BC Team: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/team_displa...p?teamid=131628
LargeHadronCollider@home BC Team: http://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/team_di...php?teamid=4947
Orbit@home BC Team: http://boincstats.com/stats/team_graph.php...rbit&id=465
So come on! Join us in making the world a better place!
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