Using Your Computer for a Good Cause

We're seeing a growing trend in "going green" today, especially when people changed from advertising it as "saving the environment" to "saving a few dollars". Can't blame people for that.

But there are some people...impatient people, or geeks like me, who usually have a computer on twenty four hours a day. While I leave mine going because I randomly use it at different points of the day as well as remotely access my files and have backup jobs running during the night, much of the time it just sort of sits there doing...well, not much.

But what if you turned those unused CPU cycles into something that could help other people?

It's not hard to do. Just mosey over to the BOINC project and download their client to your computer.

See, a lot of scientific work takes huge amounts of computing power. The problem is that these schools and foundations have limited funds for computers. That means that it takes longer to process the terabytes of information they've gathered for their research.

Here's where you come in. In many cases these jobs can be broken down into discrete quantities, kind of like packets of work. What BOINC does is let you sign up for what projects you'd like to volunteer to assist with (you can sign up for one or two or five...whatever you feel like assisting with) and download a few "packets" of work. Your computer then works on the jobs and periodically checks in with the project's servers to upload your results and download a new set of work items. While it may not seem like much, this sets up a HUGE virtual computer for researchers to tap into, greatly assisting in speeding up their research results and ultimately possibly helping many people...possibly even you.

What kind of projects can you assist with?

I'm working with the Rosetta@Home project. That project is working on protein folding...there's a full explanation on their page, but basically it's figuring out how different proteins fit together. This research is helping in finding therapies and drugs to cure HIV, Alzheimer's, and cancer, among other things.

There's a whole list of different things you can assist with on the BOINC page and you can sign up to help with many different one. You can configure how you'd like it to work and most of the time you probably won't notice your computer doing a heckuva lot...I have mine set to "pause" the BOINC jobs whenever the computer detects it is in use by me. I walk away and the system begins modeling proteins again.

It's a small contribution...but there's a slim chance that your contribution could end up curing a disease or at least furthering progress on finding a cure. There's plenty of people asking for your help out there. So why not turn your spare unusued computing power into something that might do some good for little effort?