Cure Alzheimer's! Find Aliens!
Have idle CPU cycles going to waste? Put them to work for science via BOINC — a distributed computing platform. Projects include Rosetta@home for protein folding research, SETI@home for extraterrestrial signal detection, and global climate prediction modeling. There are currently over 176,769 active volunteers worldwide. Your computer could be helping solve the world's hardest problems while you sleep.
BOINC: A Closer Look
Do you have a computer at home sitting idle 90% of the time? If you're like me, you have several. Did you know you can put wasted computing power to good use to help make scientific discoveries? Well now you do.
There is a distributed computing platform called BOINC that runs on your machine(s) as a screen saver. What happen is when the screen saver kicks in, your computer receives a calculation to work on which will help move us toward solving scientific problems.
The cool part is there are many to choose from:
- • Rosetta@home - calculates protein folding to help find a cure for Alzheimer's.
- • SETI@home - crunches telescope data looking for messages from alien life
- • ClimatePrediction - models data to calculate climate change
- • Enigma@home - attempts
- • LUC@home - helps analyze data from the Large Hadron Collider
- • World Computing Grid - looking for cures for AIDS, Cancer, etc.
- • and many more.
As of today, there are 176,769 volunteers with 794,367 computers contributing to this project. The screen savers look pretty cool too! Rosetta looks like this:
I encourage your to download the screen saver, pick a cause you believe in, and donate that free idle processing to the world.
Cody Leet
12/1/2017