Eric
Posts : 9738 Join date : 2012-07-30 Age : 73 Location : Pensacola
| Subject: Be a good guy - help cure disease with your spare computer cycles. Sat Jun 22, 2013 10:25 am | |
| Over the years, I have used my computers to perform tasks in the background. It is a process called "Distributed Computing". The first thing I did was Seti@home. UC-Berkley would send a small portion of the incredible amount of data recorded by the huge Aricebo, Puerto Rico, dish. The PC would analyze the signals and ship off the results, then download another portion of the spectrum recordings. I guess I was helping to identify E.T. amongst the chatter. The last few years, I quit doing SETI stuff and dedicate processor time to helping scientists cure diseases. In order to see how cures work, all kinds of molecules need to be modeled in 3-D and that takes a lot of computer horsepower. Splitting the chore up amongst thousands of personal computers, it is like having supercomputers working on the research. I can remember processing stuff on AIDS, Influenza, Malaria, and Cancer to name a few. I just joined a group called Folding@home. Here's a couple of paragraphs from their web site. - Quote :
- Help Stanford University scientists studying Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, and many cancers by simply running a piece of software on your computer.
The problems we are trying to solve require so many calculations, we ask people to donate their unused computer power to crunch some of the numbers. In just 5 minutes ... Add your computer to over 340,000 others around the world to form the world's largest distributed supercomputer. Won't you please consider donating your spare computer time to a worthy cause? If you are plugged into power, you probably won't notice the difference... it doesn't seem to slow my systems down. If you are running off a battery, you WILL notice less battery time, however. I think you can set it up to automatically disable "folding" when a power source is disconnected. Folding@home | |
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